Spending on Spies

Another day, another NSA release.
 Today's release of the so-called Black
Budget document shows American taxpayers how much was budgeted for the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, covering expenditures on the CIA, the
NSA and other government departments excluding funding for military
intelligence gathering.

Here's the opening page of the FY
2013 Congressional Budget Justification, signed by one James Clapper:

For fiscal year 2013, James
Clapper's objective was to receive $52.6 billion in funding which would be
allocated to the following activities:

The Central Intelligence Agency was
to receive 28 percent of the funds, to be budgeted into the following
categories:

The budget for the CIA has risen by
56 percent since 2004, most of which has been spent on data collection.

The National Reconnaissance Program (NRP) which operates the nation's networlk of spy satellites was to receive 20
percent of the funds, to be budgeted into the following categories:

The Consolidated Cryptologic Program
(CCP) which includes the National Security Agency was to receive 21 percent of
the funds, to be budgeted into the following categories:

In case you wondered, here's a graph
that shows how the funding for CCP has changed since fiscal 2004:

The budget for the NSA alone has
risen by 53 percent since 2004.  The NSA has spent heavily on management,
facilities and support and spends about 20 percent of its budget on data
analysis.

Here's a graph showing how the
number of employees working within CCP (including the NSA) has changed since
2004:

In total, there are just over
107,000 employees in the intelligence community with the equivalent of just
under 84,000 full time equivalent civilian employees and just over 23,000
military positions.  Sequestration has had an impact on the intelligence
community as well; just over 1200 positions have been shed or just under 1
percent of the total workforce.

One phrase that I did find
interesting was under the Objectives section of the report as noted here:

"Counterintelligence
(CI). To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to
strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community. In
addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI against key
targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Cuba." 

I found the inclusion of Israel as
an offensive Counterintelligence target in amongst China, Pakistan and Russia
rather odd!

Here's another one:

"The counterproliferation (CP)
mission continues to support a variety of actions to deter, disrupt, and
prevent proliferation. This includes improving our understanding of Pakistani
nuclear weapons and dangerous nuclear material security; intelligence on
proliferators, such as Iran and North Korea, to roll back and block weapons
programs; increasing our ability to ascertain global chemical and biological
threats; and better integrating multidiscipline coverage of WMD targets such as
chemical weapons in Libya and Syria." (my bold)

So, how well did that work for the
people of Ghouta in Syria?

  

Now at least we know where some of
those tax dollars that are remitted to Washington are headed and how much it is costing American taxpayers to have their emails, text messages and cell phone calls listened to.