The Black Budget: Do we really know where our money goes or how much?

[Are_grits_groceries]

"Wired" mag article:Go Inside the $56 Billion ‘Black’ Budget

The Pentagon dropped its $533 billion budget this week. Some line items get a thorough public debate — like stealth jet engines and soldier health care. Others have opaque names like “RETRACT MAPLE,” and are totally hush-hush. Welcome to the Defense Department’s classified, or black, budget. It appears to be about $56 billion, the same as last year, less some inflation.

This may only be the tip of an iceberg of secret funds (more about that in a sec). But we’d like your assistance in mapping out that icy tip. So, with help from the Center for New American Security’s Travis Sharp, we’ve put together this spreadsheet. Feel free to add, subtract and edit it — kind of like a classified cash Wiki.
<snip>
But don’t think that this is necessarily all of the Pentagon’s secret cash.

The pencil pushers in Arlington play all kinds of tricks with the line items to keep outsiders from guessing where, exactly, the black budget actually gets spent. Some of the National Intelligence Program, a component of the country’s intelligence budget, gets hidden away inside the Pentagon’s ledger. For years, the Department stashed a chunk of the CIA’s cash and its share of funds for the secret satellite makers at the National Reconnaissance Office in the blandly-named “Selected Activities in Other Procurement, Air Force” funding line. The NIP budget request was officially disclosed for the first time this year, and so you’re likely looking at some of its $55 billion in these line items.
<snip>
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/go-inside-the-56-billion-black-budget/

From WaPo:
Explore Top Secret America
The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it's fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping its citizens safe.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/?hpid=z14

This article from WaPo is a comprehensive look at the this system. It has many interactive features. The reporters did a yeoman's job. However,I don't think they were able to find more than a fraction of the scope and size of these organizations and the total budget.

Then there is this scary nugget:
The Patriot Act is much broader than you think with huge domestic surveillance powers
<snip>
For months, two Senators have screamed bloody murder that the government holds a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to a whole different law giving the feds massive domestic surveillance powers. Now, a measure by Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall would force the U.S. intelligence chief, and by extension the entire intelligence community, to admit that they went too far in their Patriot Act interpretations — if they don’t find a way to wiggle out of it.
<snip>
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/bill-would-force-intel-chief-to-rebuke-secret-patriot-act/

Not even all the Senators know what is in the new PA.
I don't think anyone in the world knows how much money is in the black Budget.

I don't know what to say......,

[midnight]

1. The idea that two senators want Eric Holder to admit the patriot act went to far,

but not get rid of it seems crazy.... Just get rid of it...

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. That is why it is the black budget...