Snowden: USA har 350 miljarders skuggbudget för hemliga program utan demokratisk insyn

Ny Snowden-läcka:
- 350 "osynliga" miljarder i en skuggbudget utanför demokratins ramar och insyn - "för hemlig verksamhet"...
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Black Budget: Snowden reveals US spends $52bn on secret programs

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Publicerad den 31 aug 2013

Britain has asked the New York Times to get rid of copies of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. That's as another US newspaper revealed from one of the top-secret files, just how much America spends on surveillance . The so called Black Budget has never been shown to the public until now. Meanwhile Snowden's leaks have won him international recognition. He was awarded the 2013 Whistleblower Prize by a coalition of NGO's. And as RT's Peter Oliver in Berlin says, Snowden's name is featuring prominently in Germany's upcoming general election.

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FY 2013
Congressional Budget Justification

RT 2013-08-29
Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has leaked a new top-secret document that for the first time ever publically discloses how the United States spends tens of billions of dollars annually on clandestine spy programs.

The Washington Post revealed the so-called “black budget” on Thursday and reports that $52.6 billion was set aside for operations in fiscal year 2013.

Among the biggest priorities for the intelligence community, the Post reported, are “offensive cyber operations” and research devoted to decoding encrypted communications.

The Post’s Barton Gellman, Greg Miller and Julie Tate wrote Thursday that Mr. Snowden, the 30-year-old former Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who started leaking classified national security documents earlier this year, provided the paper with the never-before published summary of this year’s budget.

But although the Post reported that the document is 178 pages in length, they have at the same time elected to only make available one-tenth of the content, citing “concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods” brought up by US officials who were notified ahead of publication.


“Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that the Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online,” the paper wrote in the article that accompanies the 17-page selection. The document is labeled “top secret” and warns that it is only to be accessed by US citizens with the proper security clearance.

Shrouded in secrecy, the amount that Uncle Sam sets aside for sensitive operations each year is not allowed to be published for eyes outside of the intelligence community and only for a portion of those briefed on its operations. The latest Snowden leak reveals that at $52.6 billion, the government is actually handing out 2.3 percent fewer than it did in fiscal year 2012 and, additionally, sequestration has caused the agencies to shed 1,241 positions, or around one percent of its workforce.
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- Despite these setbacks, though, the budget, described by the Post as “a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny,” includes billions of dollars towards operations that may not be funded if debated in the press.

In comparison, the Department of Homeland Security was allocated $55.4 billion in FY2013. The black budget comes in at a figure larger than the sums received by the Department of the Interior, the Department of Commerce and NASA this year combined.

Yet despite the hefty cost of operating the secret operations amid sequestration, excerpts from the summary leaked by Snowden show that the US still has significant setbacks keeping it from achieving its intelligence goals.

For one, the disclosure in and of itself demonstrates the intelligence community’s inability to prevent sensitive information from being leaked.

In FY2013, the budget summary says the government invested in ramping-up its counterintelligence operations at a time when budget cuts led to reductions in the community’s workforce, operations, long-term investments, infrastructure and information technology sectors.
“To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the community,” the document reads.

[...]

And for those nations of upmost interest, the intelligence community is investing heavily on “offensive cyber operations” launched by the CIA and NSA to hack foreign competitors, steal data and sabotage servers. The Post neglected to publish any excerpts from the summary detailing to what degree the intelligence community has been engaging in these strategic hacks, saying only that recently launched efforts are more “aggressive” than before.

- As RT has reported extensively in the past, the US government has been accused of being the biggest hackers on the planet at a time when, domestically, so-called cybercriminals are prosecuted at an alarming rate for comparably less harsh crimes.

Last week, RT reported that hacker and political activist Jeremy Hammond of Chicago, Illinois will soon be sentenced for his admitted role in aiding with malicious campaigns targeting the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, computer servers used by various New York State police chiefs and a company that provides munitions used to gas protesters in Egypt, among others.

According to a letter written by Hammond from a New York City jail cell, the US government used a confidential informant within the hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec “to facilitate the hacking of targets of the government’s choosing – including numerous websites belonging to foreign governments.”

“Why was the United States using us to infiltrate the private networks of foreign governments? What are they doing with the information we stole? And will anyone in our government ever be held accountable for these crimes?” Hammond asked.

http://rt.com/usa/snowden-leak-black-budget-176/
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Snowden: USA har 350 miljarders skuggbudget för hemliga program utan demokratisk insyn