What to Make of 'Top Secret America?'

... While more than a few journalists have tracked the intelligence community over the years, most have focused only on contracting and outsourcing. For example, Tim Shorrock, whose 2008 book Spies for Hire recounts many of the problems with relatively unregulated intelligence contracting, has been following the issues surrounding the so-called "outsourcing" of the IC since 2005. He even assembled a searchable database of intelligence contractors, and routinely blogs about what they are up to. Jeremy Scahill, a reporter at the Nation, focuses on security contractors and documents their activities (Scahill wrote a damning article on Blackwater's secret activities in Pakistan).

But Priest and Arkin expand their discussion to the IC as a whole — the story, they contend, isn't just the possible misuse of contractors, but the growth of the national security state since 2001. And in this they are right — the IC has grown by leaps and bounds, and now produces a veritable avalanche of information. It's far too much for any one person to read, and far too much even for a bureaucracy like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the agency set up to coordinate intelligence activities, to manage. Intelligence agencies and their contractors now work on everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to global counter-drug operations, unconventional warfare like psychological operations, weapons and technology, and even operations in space...

Much more at PBS.