Nation's Spies Got $43.5 Billion in 2007, Gov Says

The nation's spy bureaucracies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, received $43.5 billion in taxpayer money in 2007, the Director of National Intelligence reluctantly announced Tuesday.

The nation's top spies have argued for years that publishing even top-level budget figures would cause grave danger to the United States, but Congress required the release in the first bill it took up in 2007, which focused on implementing leftover recommendations from the 9/11 commission.

In 1997 and 1998, the budget numbers were $26.6. and $26.7 bilion, respectively. Those numbers were revealed after the Federation of American Scientists wrested the numbers free via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Stephen Aftergood, who runs Secrecy News for the FAS, has long fought to learn such figures, but has been constantly stymied by judges accepting arguments from government officials that even revealing budget figures from 50 years ago would help our enemies.

Following today's announcement (.pdf), Aftergood wonders:

Because the new disclosure is so sharply at odds with past practice, it may introduce some positive instability into a recalcitrant classification system. The question implicitly arises, if intelligence officials were wrong to classify this information, what other data are they wrongly withholding?

Danger Room has more. Photo: Vyacheslav Stepanyuchenko