Tom Engelhardt: The National Security Complex and You

Your security is a joke, and you are the butt of it. When my daughter was small, and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours. In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line, which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force: "That makes me mad!" It was the book's title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives, and it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind boggling numbers from everyday life of our National Security Complex. For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book's punch line slightly to:"That makes no sense!" Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain. Try the line yourself, and we'll get started: Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America's "secrets"? Then you should breathe a sign of relief and consider this headline from a recent article on the inside pages of my hometown paper: "Cost to Protect US Secrets Doubles to Over $11 Billion." A government outfit few of us knew existed, the Information Security Oversight Office or ISOO, just released its "Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities for Fiscal Year 2011". Strangely, no price tag was given. However, on producing the report or maintaining ISOO, Unclassified portions, written in classic bureaucratese offer this precise figure for protecting our secrets, vetting our secrets protectors, and ensuring the safety of the whole shebang: $11.37 billion in 2011.