Written by G. Ross Stephens   

Everyone needs to think about the information/intelligence/data collected by government as being contained in a multiplicity of silos. This concept of information contained in ‘silos’ is attributable to Paul O’Neil, George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary (Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. vii).

For the agriculturally uninitiated, silos are vertical cylinders made out of stone, cement blocks, steel, or other material, usually 40 to 60 feet high that are used to contain animal feed (silage), stored for winter use. O’Neil thinks it an apt concept for the separate collections of information stored by government agencies and private corporations.

Before Messrs. Snowden and Manning, O’Neil indicated, we should not worry about ‘leakers’ and ‘whistle-blowers’, but we should worry about public policies and actions based on information stored in different places and access thereto. For the formulation, carry through, and management of public policy; you need accurate, timely information from multiple silos.

When considering government or private collections of information, the concept that it is collected in individual silos can be very useful so I have taken the liberty of elaborating.

Though many of these silos are private, think Google or Facebook, or General Electric and Exxon-Mobile. Many of these silos are run by government departments and agencies, or contracted out to private corporations – Public agency silos are supposedly for the development, elaboration, and management of public policy, but not always.

Private silos are usually for the self-interest of those collecting the information, except when this information is collected on contract for the government, then there may be a very sticky situation in terms of who uses it and how this information is used. The extensive privatization of government has led to a lack of accountability on the part of both public officials and private interests. No one knows what is actually going on.

Some of these silos are open to the general public and accessible; think Commerce Department and the Bureau of the Census. Others are partially or completely closed or want to be, think the Department of defense (DoD) and its ‘black budget’ of $50+ billion; Homeland Security (HSA) and their many departments and sub-agencies; also National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with an intelligence ‘black budget’ of $50+ billion. Others are partially open, partially closed.

The CIA, NSA, law enforcement agencies like the FBI, and others apparently have major privacy violating access to many of these silos, public and private, but what is the quality of information accessed? For large departments and agencies, many of these silos are intra-departmental, i.e., many different silos within the department. There are at least 22 silos in Homeland Security. No one knows how many in DoD because of the extensive classification of information. For some agencies there may exist other forms of information sequestration.

In many of these silos there are problems of the quality of information available – when it is actually available. Each silo contains information: some of it good, some is simply institutional mythology, much of it incomplete, some needs qualification, some is economically or politically biased or political folklore, some the musings of self-interested players. Some may be totally spurious. According to Secretary O’Neil, these silos can be a huge obstacle to managing the unwieldy American system of government.

Thinking about this in terms the American federal system means the citizens have their access to information diced and sliced-up into many little pieces. This because we have multiple levels and layers of government, thus a menagerie of multiple overlaid silos: 1) the Feds have 150 plus departments and agencies, with numerous intra-agency divisions and many closed silos; 2) the 50 States and 7 state-like entities and their 6,000 departments and agencies; and 3) some 89,000 local governments having: an estimated 265,000 plus departments and agencies. Though the Feds pay some of the costs, 75 to 80 percent of domestic public services are delivered by state and local governments.

The body politic is similarly ‘sliced and diced’ in terms of its actions toward and response to this menagerie of limited information. Coordinated action on the part of, or in the interest of the general public is virtually impossible. The body politic is afflicted with a massive case of institutional and informational myopia.

Some of these bureaucracies are open, some closed. Closed bureaucracies usually sequester information and are predominantly those involved in all aspects of regulation and law enforcement – police, the courts, intelligence, war, and national security – though sequestering can exist elsewhere.

Over the past two or three decades we have privatized government, particularly activities related to war and national security. Public and private access has not only become mixed up, but quantumly entangled with the privatization war and national security. For DoD, depending on year, 50 to 60 percent of its expenditures are contracted-out to private corporations; for intelligence activities, it’s 70 percent; for the Energy Department, it’s 75 to 80 percent (read atomic weapons) given the total of over 400,000 contracts to private corporations for these activities.

On September 10, 2001, the day before the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference to note that the Pentagon could not track or account for $2.3 trillion in past expenditures. Other estimates at the time placed these unaccounted for expenditures at closer to $4 trillion. Think ‘pork barrel’.

The next day everything changed and Congress threw more trillions at the Pentagon and at least eight other agencies involved in national security. Our twelve years of war in the Middle East has cost estimates in the $3 to $5+ trillion dollar range. With a huge share of our major corporations living on the public dole how corrupt is the system? Given sequestered silos, closed bureaucracies, and this amount of money, corruption is rampant. The military-industrial complex is alive and well, prospering at public expense.

The problem is that less and less reliable information is available to public officials and the general public. What is available may be a tiny slice of the larger picture, skewed for purposes of corporate profits, or entirely misleading. Many federal data collection activities have been curtailed or eliminated over the last 15 to 20 years; more with sequestration of the budget. Data collection by the Census Bureau has been drastically curtailed. For example, the elaborate Census of Governments has been virtually eliminated, except for the enumeration the number of governments and a little bit about their finances and employees. Why would the public need information about government in our vaunted democracy?

There are those in Congress and the private sector that don’t want us to know what is going on in government or who is pulling the strings. For many major public policies and issues the public hasn’t a clue [like privacy, going to war, the threat of natural disasters, global warming, and the redistribution of income to private corporations and the wealthy using the tax code, etc.] and isn’t likely to get accurate unbiased information. Nor are those who report the news much more likely to know what is actually going on. This, as we consider becoming involved in Syria's religious civil war. It’s the new age of the ‘know nothings’ both inside and outside of government.