Shadows of a thug state
Millions of secret documents, thousands of dark acts
Shadows of a thug state
The revelations of Edward Snowden, and the other leakers of US intelligence, have given Americans the illusion that they really know what their government is up to. They don’t. It’s far bigger, and far worse.
Le Monde Diplomatique -- by Tom Engelhardt
Intelligence officials have estimated just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took when he headed for Hong Kong last June: 1.7 million. At least they claim that as the number he accessed. Let’s assume that it’s accurate, and add a caveat. Whatever he had with him when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents. Many millions of NSA documents did not get the Snowden treatment.
What he did take will occupy journalists for years (and historians long after that). However, the NSA is only one of 17 outfits in the US intelligence community. Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all generate their own troves of secret documents. That’s just intelligence agencies. If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the US nuclear arsenal) and the Pentagon. We’re talking about secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through in a century.
We do know that, in 2011, the whole government classified 92,064,862 documents. If typical, that means, in the 21st century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance. Of those, thanks to one man, we have had access to a tiny percentage of 1.7 million. You the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen — in what we still like to think of as a democracy — are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name, unless its officials decide to cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely absorbing — or an Edward Snowden releases documents over the bitter protests and death threats of Washington officialdom.
http://mondediplo.com/2014/03/12state