From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

The Washington Post this week published the first three installments of an ongoing series about

Top Secret America, its name for the shadowy disconnected intelligence apparatus that has

ballooned in size, scope, and

funding since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The authors are the posts Dana Priest and

Military and Intelligence Analyst William Arkin. The premise is that no one, not even those

at the highest levels of government, has a clear picture of who's doing what

in American intelligence. Some of the Post's findings, there are 1,271 government organizations

and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence,

and an estimated

854,000 people who have top secret security clearances.

Arkin says the two-year-long project was, in a word, daunting.

We thought to ourselves, how in the hell are we going to be able to figure out what is the totality of what has

transpired since 9-11? And the way in which we thought about it was anything, whether it's

warrantless surveillance or the most innocuous program, has to be located somewhere. And we set

about the process of figuring that out.

Then we were able to start analyzing the data to look for patterns or significant new facts.

And I would say that there are basically three that we discovered.

One was the number of new organizations and new companies which have been created since 9-11.

Two was the domination of information technology in this new industry.

And number three, this is an industry which has transformed itself from one which is primarily in the public sector to one that is increasingly

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