[ChuckMcM]

This is incorrect. The entirety of the NSA's budget has to fit "within" the existing government budget. And other departments do use money. So it is not unlimited. Defense and International security assistance is $643B this year [1] not a trillion dollars, and certainly not two trillion.

[1] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258

[ck2]

If you think you can pinpoint secret project costs in budgets, go find the the X-37B expenditures as an example.

To date the development and missions are estimated to be around $1 trillion. You think that is visible to the public anywhere?

(and yes my previous 1 trillion reference was to the calculations, not cost)

[vonmoltke]

> If you think you can pinpoint secret project costs in budgets, go find the the X-37B expenditures as an example.

It is in the Air Force budget. It may or may not be a line item. If it is, it uses an unclassified code name. The revenue for the contractors works the same way; the exact revenues for the program are hidden in totals.

[aidos]

I believe the 1 trillion is in reference to the "one trillion guesses per second."

[malandrew]

With the information they have, what is to stop them from "taxing" the global economy indirectly via the capital markets.

Seems like they could easily set up investment companies anywhere in the world, trading on all sorts of information and funnel those proceeds back to fund more NSA activities.

There's the classic movie plot of the person who devices a virus to skim fractions of a penny off many transactions, which in aggregate is significant. Now take an organization, whose mandate is to collect as much information as they can, has operated for 60 years, and has had the benefit of being attached to the country with the greatest global and political reach ever seen. The possibility to embed themselves in the economic fabric of every country and market in the world is well in the realm of possible.

It's not like funding humint and sigint activities from capitalistic activities is without precedent. Air America was one example [0]. That one mechanism only blew up and became know because it was beyond egregious. Too many average people had knowledge to keep such activities a secret.

Now imagine you have the largest surveillance apparatus in the World and it's the late 1980s. Do you not think that the NSA and CIA took some notice of the incredible amount of money that could be made on money in those days. Pretty much all the activities we have learned the NSA and CIA have been involved with are harder to justify (surveillance, torture, propping up bad governments, etc.) from the perspective of American ideology than making money from capitalistic activities based on information asymmetries.

These are the types of activities that we will only see a whistleblower for if they are finance focused (accountant/auditor/investor) and have broad access to information. Unfortunately, people with intimate awareness of the financial operations of the NSA are far more rare than a security and surveillance analyst like Edward Snowden (since that is the core business of the NSA)

At Enron, a massive multinational organization, the number of people who were truly aware of the shenanigans going only were a tiny fraction of a fraction of the employees. It's safe to assume that when ever any organization gets large enough they invest in financial professionals of great capacity and task them with being creative. Why would would we expect any different from the NSA or CIA?

It would be especially interesting if Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald were to connect with and involve freedom-loving financial forensic professionals who have the skills to comb through their trove and uncover questionable financial operations practices (assuming the archives that Snowden had access to were broad enough to include financial details, especially those that concern revenue and not just expenditures.