Back in October, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and her colleague Bill Arkin reported on the extensive, out-of-control growth of private security contract work in the federal government.  Their series "Secret America" revealed the booming industry, including hundreds of office buildings scattered across the country, dedicated to the work of keeping us safer. 

Now Dana Priest returns with an update on the security industrial complex in a new episode of PBS's "Frontline" called "Are We Safer?"  The question is important, since increasing amounts of federal funding, reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, are being spent on what many analysts consider to be wasteful and dangerously unregulated programs.

The story begins in Maryland in 2001, shortly before the terrorist attacks, when a routine traffic stop turned out to be one of many contacts authorities had with the 9/11 hijackers.  Ziad Jarrah was pulled over by the State patrol and ticketed and released.  They had no reason to suspect that Jarrah would go on to take over Flight 93 and crash it into a field in Pennsylvania.  But the resulting political firestorm over contacts with the 9/11 attackers--including their much publicized flight training and passport problems--gave impetus to federal funding for a host of new security programs.

The idea popular in Washington immediately following the attacks was that if intelligence and local law enforcement agencies had communicated better prior to 9/11, the incidents never would have happened.  The idea of a "flight check" list, and other suggestions directed at preventing major attacks, "opened up the spigot" on federal security funding, according to experts like Richard Clarke, the "anti-terrorism" czar from 1998 to 2001.

According to Clarke, what we should be asking ourselves about all the new security measures and programs is, "What would have happened if we hadn't done all that?"  His answer: "Nothing."

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was supposed to help various agencies to "connect the dots," gathering together data in ways that did not occur just prior to 9/11.  DHS brought 17 different agencies under one roof, all of them dedicated to investigation and security.  But the result, according to Clarke and many other experts, has been an unprecedented build-up in bureaucracy and waste.  The new DHS headquarters alone will cost more than $3.4 billion, and along with its satellites it will provide more office space than the Pentagon.  The complexity, sheer size, and lack of transparency prevent anyone from knowing for sure what the total cost really comes out to.

In addition to DHS, after 9/11 the government began building "intelligence fusion centers" all around the country.  There are 72 fusion centers today, where thousands of people work collating data on everything from traffic stops, to travel patterns of individuals, to the activities of suspected terrorist groups.

The problem is that the targets of many investigations have been less than dangerous, to say the least.  In Maryland, at the first of the fusion centers to be completed, the data gathering activity quickly focused on anti-war and environmentalist groups.  Investigators gathered personal information on dozens of well known pacifist protestors, including Catholic nuns.  The new interconnectivity of the security apparatus allowed the information to be spread everywhere, and the travel patterns of peaceful activists was tracked, with some ending up on no-fly lists, restricting their ability to travel to events in other states and foreign countries.  The ACLU brought suit and the case became public, embarrassing the State of Maryland and federal authorities.  It became known as the "nun case."

Hunger for data in the growing system (funding is often based on results, measured in terms of the volume of data collected) resulted in the proliferation of so called SARs, or suspicious activity reports.  New technology, such as CCTV and license plate readers installed in local police cars, quickly built up huge stores of data on the travel patterns and other personal habits of tens of thousands of Americans.  Ironically many of them are federal employees working in the same industry as those gathering and analyzing the data.  Much of the remote technology being used was first tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and along with the continuing wars, the new security boom has caused conferences and conventions on the latest gadgets and ideas to spring up and become a regular fixture in the government contracting industry.

As Priest and Arkin previously reported, the private contractor industry extends well beyond Washington, and comprises a whole new arm to the military industrial complex.  Since the work is done through private companies, those who receive the money are not under the same reporting requirements as government agencies.  The routine method of farming out work to third-party contractors also means that exact funding figures--how much is being spent and where it's actually going--are often unavailable.  As one government expert puts it, "No one knows how much it costs or what it all does."  The lack of transparency leads many critics to feel fatalistic about the new programs--their attitude is that whether we like it or not, we're stuck with them.  Even veterans of the Pentagon, used to seeing huge amounts of waste, are surprised by the extent of the problem.  Members of the 9/11 Commission have complained that there are no overall price controls on security programs, and no regulatory agency that has any real power of enforcement over DHS.

The excuse of officials who have to answer questions about the potential for abuse and invasion of privacy of everyday citizens is that with the advent of the internet age, information is available online anyway.  The attempt to make critics look old-fashioned doesn't stand up, though, since much of the information available online is generated by the voluntary activities of individuals.  If you take out an insurance policy, or sign up for a new credit card, then you can be sure that some amount of personal information is going to end up on the internet.  But travel patterns, biometric data, political activities, and other information being mined by private contractors is not available online, that is, not unless some contractor puts it there.

The final criteria for success or failure of these new programs is whether they really make us safer.  Supporters of the vast amount of spending being done on security point to the many foiled plots since 9/11 as proof that it's all money well spent.  But does this claim hold up to scrutiny? Not according to Clarke. 

For example, the so-called "underwear bomber" was allowed on a plane even though his name was on a no-fly list because it was misspelled.  It was airline employees and passengers on board the plane who prevented him from carrying out an attack.  Again, what about the Times Square bomber?  Despite the presence of massive amounts of surveillance technology in the area, including security cameras hooked up to facial recognition software, it was a street vendor who tipped off authorities to the parked SUV loaded with a bomb (that may or may not have been rigged right to explode).  The same can be said about the ineffectiveness of high-tech security equipment backed up by data gathering efforts in the recent attempt on a military recruiting center.  The would-be attacker was identified by someone reading Facebook and reporting it to the FBI, and not by data collation, SAR documents, CCTV or some other "creep" means.  DHS wasn't even initially involved in the investigation.

So my answer to the question "Are we safer?" is that we weren't all that unsafe to begin with.  We are, however, a lot more broke due to the huge amount of waste at DHS and their many private extensions.  And despite what some would claim, we can stop all the overspending and secrecy by not letting up on our criticism of a system that seems bent on removing larger and larger chunks of public funding from public view, while turning on us.