After failing to detect and stop Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack sixteen years ago, Congress more than doubled the budget of American intelligence agencies and gave them unprecedented secret authorities. As the intelligence beat reporter for the Washington Post at the time, I watched these agencies grow in size, as dozens of new buildings appeared around the Washington region to house a ballooning workforce of over a million people with top-secret security clearances.
The New Yorker: Russia’s election meddling is another American intelligence failure
Senator John McCain (C) listens during the Senate Armed Services Committee on Information surrounding the Marines United Website at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington March 14, 2017.The Senate Armed Services Committee held the hearing with General Robert Neller, who heads the Marine Corps. The Pentagon faced a burgeoning scandal March 10, 2017 as more pictures of naked female service members apparently shared without their consent by male colleagues have turned up on secret social media sites. The scandal broke over the weekend with the revelation that pictures of female Marines in various stages of undress had been shared in a secret Facebook group called "Marines United."Membership in the group was restricted to current and former Marines, but it had as many as 30,000 members before it was taken down.The story was first reported by The War Horse, a news group run by Marine veteran Thomas Brennan.He said some of the photos were taken surreptitiously, while others had been taken by the women themselves but shared without their consent. / AFP PHOTO / Tasos Katopodis
