Your tax dollars at work: Inside the United States’ $52.6B “black budget”

The United States’ “black budget” for fiscal 2013 amounts to $52.6 billion (or $167 per American), and it details what The Washington Post calls a “bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.”
According to a new front-page story on Thursday, the Post says that it now has the entire 178-page classified budget summary as supplied by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. This entire budget comprises the annual expenditures for the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and other spy and military agencies.
With respect to the tech-focused highlights, the Post notes that the CIA and NSA “have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as ‘offensive cyber operations.’”
Additionally, it appears there are far more potential leakers than we once thought. According to the Post’s reporting, the “NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own.”
Not surprisingly, the documents also apparently show that the United States has its eyes particularly on the international community’s two biggest pariahs: North Korea and Iran. The US intelligence community has “all but surrounded [North Korea] with surveillance platforms” and “new surveillance techniques and technologies have enabled analysts to identify suspected nuclear sites that had not been detected in satellite images [from Iran]”
Since Snowden leaked his set of documents to the Post, The Guardian, and others, there has been increasing attention focused on the vast surveillance network that captures a huge amount of digital communications. However, as Ars has pointed out previously, storing all that data for long periods of time is near-impossible—so the NSA has to resort to short-term capture and then selective searching and filtered storage.
The Post reports that of the NSA’s budget, it was “projected to spend $48.6 million on research projects to assist ‘coping with information overload,’ an occupational hazard as the volumes of intake have increased sharply from fiber optic cables and Silicon Valley Internet providers.”

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But it’s not just the NSA getting in on the SIGINT (signal intelligence) game. As the Post reports:

Even the CIA devotes $1.7 billion, or nearly 12 percent of its budget, to technical collection efforts including a program called “CLANSIG” that former officials said is the agency’s more targeted version of the massive data collection operations of the NSA.
The CIA is pursuing tracking systems “that minimize or eliminate the need for physical access and enable deep concealment operations against hard targets.”
The agency has deployed new biometric sensors to confirm the identities and locations of al-Qaeda operatives. The system has been used in the CIA’s drone campaign.
The NSA is also planning high-risk covert missions, a lesser-known part of its work, to plant what it calls “tailored radio frequency solutions” in hostile territory—close-in sensors to intercept communications that do not pass through global networks.

Sadly, neither the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) newly created Twitter or Tumblr accounts have a response to the new document.
“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” the ODNI’s director, James Clapper, told the Post.
“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities, and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,” he added.
The Post has created an interactive Web feature to better understand the black budget.