The $44 Billion Black Hole

In case you missed it, here's a funny story from last week:

In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence official has revealed at a public conference what has long been secret: the amount of money the United States spends on its spy agencies.

At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.

That's about $150 million a year for every man, woman and child in this wondrous land of ours. It's also up from the $26.7 billion spent in 1998, the last year the spooks 'fessed up (they continue to resist Freedom of Information lawsuits asking for spy budgets going all the way back to the 1940s).

Feel intelligent yet?

Link via Secrecy News, which also points to this Federal Times article on same.