They'll Never Look There!

For the second year running, the Department of Energy is claiming that its budget for intelligence is classified information. Hopefully, like last year, the DOE will also publish this secret information on its publicly available website, where you can see that the 2004 intelligence budget was $39.8 million.

Comments

[Swamp Justice]

Why does the Department of Energy have ANY intelligence budget?! Who are they spying on? Enron and Halliburton's foreign competitors?

[SR]

Swamp, the budget may include counter-espionage work at nuclear plants and the like.

[CodeMonkeySteve]

SR:
What, they spent $40m to modify signs: "Hanford Nuclear Reservation -- Next Left^H^H^H^HRight"?

Or was it more of a Jedi Mind Trick: "This isn't the Plutonium you're looking for. Move along."?

[SR]

I'm not saying the money was well-spent. It's just that, as I understand it, one of the DoE's responsibilities is supervision of nuclear weapons facilities. Logically, such supervision could include surveillance, investigation of suspicious events, etc., that could be categorized under "intelligence". (It's worth remembering that the DoE's original name was the Atomic Energy Commission.)

[Gary Gunnels]

The NRC and the DoE were both birthed out of the AEC. They wanted to split up the promotional and regulatory duties of the AEC. NRC came into being in 1974 and the DoE (which was the Energy Research and Development Administration for a couple of years after the break-up) in 1977.

Anyway, it isn't surprising that they have an intelligence budget; why they want to keep the total amount spent on it secret is a mystery to me.

[Josh]

If the DOE is responsible for surveilance and security of Nuclear power plants and weapons facilities, the story isnt that they spent 40 mil on intelligence. The story is the ONLY spent $40 mil on "intelligence". Maybe the reason they want this information classified is because such security is so inadequate.

[Matt Welch]

GG -- Making intelligence budgets secret is a time-honored & effective way of keeping Congress, the press, and the people from asking any questions about it.

[Mathematician]

OK, maybe I'm being naive, but if we have figures for ever OTHER line item in a budget, and if we have a TOTAL for the budget, then can't we deduce the "hidden" items via subtraction?

Is subtraction some sort of math technique developed by Illuminati, further developed by the Nazis, and discovered when we cracked Enigma? Is this secret tof subtraction the REAL reason we won the Cold War? Poor Ruskie bastards never knew that $15 billion minus $14.7 billion meant that $300 million was what we speant on "black ops"? I mean, jeez! Let's get real!

Why exactly does the US government insist its intelligence services are wearing new clothes, if catch my drift? Can't anyone subtract?