| 09 February 2005 Disclosure I love politics. My first question this morning on rising was if the frog I voted for was elected to the 47 th District of Virginia. He wasn't, to my regret, since it would have sent a powerful signal to the national media that change is in the wind. Instead, the talking heads had to suffice with the election of a Democrat to replace another Democrat in this mostly Republican State . I had to divide my limited attention span between the political tea-leaves and the angst about the continued rioting in France . It has gone on long enough that the nightly burning coincides with the anniversary of Krystalnacht, the night of broken glass, in which a thousand synagogues were burned in Hitler's Germany. But unless the French get their arms around the angry young men, this could be a year-round phenomenon, and would coincide with the anniversary of everything. There doesn't appear to be an ideological component to the anger, or at least not yet. The young men are mostly burning the cars in their own neighborhoods. If it is the beginning of the end for the West, it is still an inchoate anger, and apparently on foot. We don't appear that angry at the ballot box here. All my other candidates, the ones without webbed feet, did just fine. The President is being tagged with the responsibility for the failure of the conservative religious candidate to win, since he showed up at a campaign rally in Richmond a day or so before the election. The process works. Officials disclosed the fact that there was a 44% turn-out in this election, which shows you the level of interest in an off-off year campaign. It still is a relief that the rhetoric and the ads will stop for a while. The Intelligent Design crowd will probably go back to the drawing board. They packed the Dover , PA , school board in the last election, and were the first to mandate the teaching of the idea that the world is so complex that someone really smart had to set it all in motion. The public was outraged. All of them were thrown out of office. But this war has many fronts. The Christian right has managed to capture the Kansas State Board as well, and they are casting out Darwinism as just another theory. The people of the Sunflower State won't get to vote on them for another year. In public life there is a direct connection between words and deeds, though on the elected side it hangs on the electoral process. Scooter Libbey's disclosure about Valerie Plame's classified employer at Langley have yet to come to roost, and Karl Rove is still looking over his shoulder to see if he will be called to account. Words also matter for the un-elected bureaucracy that keep the nation humming along. There was quite a buzz my old line of work yesterday. As you probably know, the overall amount of money the United States spends in the National Intelligence Program (formerly the National Foreign Intelligence Program) has been classified for most of its existence. The government has been adamant about not disclosing it. Even the top-line number, the big roll-up of all the little numbers, was considered a secret. The theory went that you could divine from small changes to the aggregate number the amount of emphasis the government was putting on collecting intelligence, and where. Secrecy begets suspicion, and organizations like the Federation of American Scientists went to court to get the number released publicly. The FAS helpfully publishes the overhead times for American satellites on their web-site, too. So you know where they are coming from. After years in court, only the data for 1963 was released, and that only because someone had slipped up and disclosed it elsewhere. The Republic did not fall, and based on that court decision, and continuing pressure for openness in the budget process, then-DCI George Tenent disclosed the top-line for fiscal 1997 and 1998. The amount for those two years was $26.6 and $26.7 billion, respectively, representing an increase of $100 million dollars. Times were hard for the Intelligence Community in those years. The information was subsequently reclassified, and no top-line information since has officially been released. The dramatic spike in funding which occurred after 9/11 resulted in the ball-park figure of “around $40 billion” appearing in the press, and it was useful shorthand. “Close enough for Government work,” is what we used to say. That all changed last week at a conference sponsored by one of the three letter Agencies down in San Antonio, TX. I wish I had put the meeting on my calendar. The Riverwalk downtown is nice this time of year, and walking to the Alamo always helps me keep things in perspective. It could always be worse. Several of the key senior staffers from the new DNI's office were in attendance, and many informative lectures were given. One contained a bombshell. I won't identify the official by name. You can find it if you want, but it could have been me, back in the day, or anyone else who has all that data running around in their brains. You would be interested to know, or not, that the annual intelligence budget is $44 billion. The individual would not comment publicly afterward on the slip, or leak, or inadvertent disclosure. The conference had classified and un-classified seminars, and it is easy enough to get confused about which audience you are speaking to. I feel sorry for the official. But with this disclosure, we have a new, unclassified baseline for the national intelligence budget, and it is 10% above the old shorthand estimate. That is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The total does not include the Military Intelligence Program, which funds the joint intelligence activities of the military departments and other surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Nor does it include the Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) programs which are embedded in the Services. So, the disclosure, even if regretted, does not provide any trend information, nor the area of focus for spending. That level of detail would be useful to the enemies of the United States only over time. And besides, there is a lot of sloshing around in $44 billion that can change things significantly, even if the number stays the same. In lonely isolation, it is just an interesting number. And as we used to say in the budget business, we have an infinite source of those . Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |