Official & unofficial answers from the US government
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[July 16] State Department warns employees about new website highlighting Top Secret facilities | The Cable
The State Department is bracing for a potentially explosive new feature on the Washington Post website that would publish the names and locations of agencies and firms conducting Top Secret work on behalf of the U.S. government, according to the copy of an email obtained by The Cable . The Diplomatic Security Bureau at State sent out a notice Thursday to all department employees warning them to protect classified information and reject inquiries from the press when the new web feature goes live. "The Washington Post plans to publish a website listing all agencies and contractors believed to conduct Top Secret work on behalf of the U.S. Government," the notice reads.
[July 19] Intelcrats’ Awesomely Bad Pushback to ‘Top Secret America’ | Danger Room | Wired.com
Late last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent out the call to contractors and intelligence agencies: the Washington Post is gearing up an expose, so compile a list of your triumphs. Some of those memos have now arrived in reporters’ inboxes as pushback to the Post’s “ Top Secret America” series . And wow, are some of the intelcrats’ talking points tendentious.But Clapper also vowed to address another of the series’ central premises: the intelligence community’s reliance on contractors. Only he wants to take a scalpel to the issue, not a chainsaw. It would be a mistake, Clapper said, to look monolithically at contractors, or to presume that they’re distributed equally throughout the intelligence community. The National Reconnaissance Office — builders and operators of spy satellites — is one of the most reliant, he said, as it relies on contractors for “operations,” while the military services’ intel shops are far less so. And the reliance on contractors is a hangover of the post-Cold War drawdown of intelligence spending, something that stopped with a “screech” on 9/11, he said, leaving intelligence agencies with little choice but to bulk up personnel with contractors — and intelligence would not have been able to respond to post-9/11 counterterrorism requirements.
