Leaked Intel Budget Reveals Massive Challenges For Spy Agencies

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A top secret intelligence budget justification leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden depicts a U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) awash in unprecedented amounts of cash, yet struggling to make cuts on outdated programs, and unable to modernize and improve security in some facilities.

The leaked budget outline, first obtained by The Washington Post, details publicly for the first time a $52.6 billion national intelligence budget for fiscal year 2013 that supports nearly $5 billion in overseas contingency operations and more than 107,000 employees across 16 agencies. A full one-third of the budget is dedicated to countering violent extremism, with another 39 percent funding the intelligence community’s ability to provide policymakers with strategic intelligence and warning.

According to HS Today in an introduction, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), said the proposed budget total represents a decrease of $1.3 billion, or 2.4 percent, below the FY 2012 enacted level. In addition, it reduces personnel by 1,241 positions or one percent, and sets the Intelligence Community “on a path to reduce expenditures by $25 billion for ten years,” Clapper said.

“Although the budget is declining, the mission is not,” Clapper said. “Prioritizing our requirements was a key element to produce a budget that meets customer needs, supports critical capabilities, addresses gaps, and helps to maintain a strategic advantage. But with the magnitude of the reduction, we could not avoid limited, targeted cuts to priority areas.”

The 17 pages made public from the 178-page report indicate that the spending reductions were the result of either cuts to infrastructure accounts or the slowing of modernization efforts designed to keep legacy systems operational.

“We reduce enterprise management activities; eliminate the IC Data Center; downsize the IC Bethesda Campus; suspend some facility improvements; and delay the replacement of aged facility components,” wrote Clapper. “As a result, we will continue to house some of the IC workforce in older and less capable facilities that may not meet current antiterrorism/force protection requirements and we will accept some degradation in the IC’s facility condition index.”

The budget also terminated investment in a consolidated human resources information system for the intelligence community, and delayed or slowed certain satellite reconnaissance modernization efforts.

But the budget priorities outlined by Clapper underscore the increasing importance of signals intelligence (electronic eavesdropping known by its acronym, SIGINT) to the counterterrorism mission, the difficulty of keeping up with the growth of electronic data, and the growing concern about cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

“We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets,” Clapper said. “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic,” he said. “As the cyber threat continues to grow, we sustain the budget for the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative and begin construction of a second High Performance Computing Center at Fort Meade, Maryland to keep pace with cyber processing demand.”

On the information technology front, the intelligence budget delayed the consolidation of certain “older systems” and eliminated plans for additional backup systems. “These offsets prevent spending to sustain or improve legacy environments when our direction is to establish a new IT environment based on more centralized common services,” said Clapper. “Investments required to establish a more efficient IC IT enterprise are protected.”

But U.S. intelligence is still toying with the notion of moving its data management programs to the cloud. “We are investigating data management solutions and their associated security issues, such as the viability of comingling data in virtualized data stores to facilitate analytical integration of different data from different sources and agencies,” wrote Clapper. “This includes new management and operating practices for the secure storage and handling of the varied information contained in different intelligence systems through the use of cloud computing.

“Never before has the IC been called upon to master such complexity and so many issues in such a resource-constrained environment.” Clapper said.