Related Stories
The Degraded Currency of the Shadow Government
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Reason
Posted: May 7th, 2026
https://reason.com/2023/03/21/the-degraded-currency-of-the-s...
It was a secret that through a program called SOMALGET the National Security Agency was recording and archiving the content of every single cell phone conversation in Afghanistan. It was not much of a secret, however, to the men on whom they eavesdropped. They knew America was listening, just as they knew that the high-pitched drones above them transmitted video data back to the States. After 2001, government in secret was unfathomably well funded. Much of it remains literally hidden: in bunkers underground or in the vast underground netherworld of dystopian Crystal City. There are floors of D.C. buildings not listed in the lobby's directory. Government agencies few Americans had heard of spent amounts of money few could fathom. Each secret program established by the government was serviced by an army of contractors; each CEO well aware that a seemingly limitless amount of money was available and oversight nonexistent. The currency of [this hidden] America is the secret, but the currency is degraded. Documents are marked classified for no particular reason ... because no one takes a document not marked secret seriously. John Kiriakou, a CIA analyst based in Virginia, once wrote a paper about Iraqi nuclear weapons and sent it to the Department of Energy. As he pressed send, it became illegal for him to access the paper he had written; he did not have the clearance. "I could count on my two hands the times that I used my open telephone in those 15 years," he told me, "because everything is classified, including the classified email system. So I want to meet my wife for lunch, so I send her an email. 'You wanna meet for lunch?' And I classify in secret note form. Why? Because everything is classified. Everything." One petabyte of information is equivalent to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. At one intelligence agency, one petabyte of classified data accumulates every year and a half. Sifting through a petabyte of information in a year would require two million employees; around 100,000 people work in intelligence for the government. "There are billions and billions of documents, and there are like 16 people declassifying everything," says Kiriakou. "So the email about meeting my wife for lunch will never be declassified, never."
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
Related Stories
Latest News
Key News Articles from Years Past
