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Black budget leaked by Edward Snowden gives details of agencies beyond CIA

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Black budget leaked by Edward Snowden gives details of agencies beyond CIA, NSA



The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency may be the best known among several U.S. spy agencies, but there are others as well, as detailed in a top-secret budget document that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post. The chart below shows the relative sizes of the largest of them:




The National Reconnaissance Office operates satellites and other remote sensors. Earlier this week, the office launched a very large rocket carrying a spy satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The budget of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Program, which provides maps for military and intelligence purposes, is more than twice what it was in 2004. Along with the NSA, the program’s analysts and technicians began using individuals’ cell phone numbers to track their locations on behalf of military units and drone operators soon after Sept. 11, 2001.

The document Snowden provided to The Post was a summary of the so-called “black budget,” which is the secret portion of the federal budget dedicated to intelligence gathering and analysis. Read Barton Gellman and Greg Miller’s full article on the budget here.



Black budget leaked by Edward Snowden gives details of agencies beyond CIA, NSA - The Washington Post
 
Here are some of the biggest revelations the Post reported:


1.Spending by the CIA has surpassed all of the other spy agencies. The CIA requested $14.7 billion for 2013. That’s roughly twice that of the NSA.


2.The CIA, NSA and National Reconnaissance Office receive the bulk of the funding—68%.



3.There funding is based on five mission objectives: Warning U.S. leaders about critical events ($20.1 billion), Combating terrorism ($17.2 billion), Stopping the spread of illicit weapons ($6.7 billion), conducting cyber operations ($4.3 billion) and defending against foreign espionage ($3.8 billion).



4.The CIA and NSA have beefed up efforts to hack into foreign computer networks. The budget refers to this as “offensive cyber operations.”



5.The NSA planned on looking into a whopping 4,000 possible “insider” threats this year, in which one of its own employees was suspected of compromising top-secret information.



6.Pakistan is described as an “intractable target.” Meanwhile, there are counterintelligence operations “strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Israel.”



7.There are ongoing, expanded efforts to collect information on Russia’s chemical warfare countermeasures. There are also efforts to look into the security of biological and chemical labs in Pakistan.



8.Details about the U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden were revealed too. According to the Post, the budget points to the operation as an example of cooperation among the intelligence agencies and reveals the raid was “guided from space by a fleet of satellites which aimed dozens of separate receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded.”




9."Blind spots” the agencies wish they more information about are acknowledged in the budget, although the document says there has been “moderate” progress on some, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement. Other blind spots include Pakistan’s nuclear program, what China’s next generation fighter aircrafts are capable of, and how Russian authorities are likely to respond in the event of a terrorist attack. The paper reported that there are what it called five “critical gaps” for North Korea—the most in comparison to other countries that “has or is pursuing” a nuclear bomb.




US intel’s ‘Black Budget’ leaked by Edward Snowden
 
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