On July 19, 2010, The Washington Post published the first installment of "Top Secret America," a landmark two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin that mapped the vast, largely hidden architecture of the post-9/11 intelligence-industrial complex. The investigation, produced with more than a dozen journalists, revealed that "the top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
The scale of privatization was staggering. The investigation documented 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on intelligence, counterterrorism, and homeland security programs across more than 10,000 locations in the United States. An estimated 854,000 people held top-secret security clearances. Close to 30 percent of the intelligence workforce — approximately 265,000 people — were private contractors rather than government employees. These contractors performed the same work as government analysts, often sitting side by side in the same facilities, but were employed by for-profit companies whose financial incentives were fundamentally different from those of public servants.
The second installment, "National Security Inc.," published July 20, focused specifically on the revolving door and contractor ecosystem. It documented how former senior intelligence officials routinely moved to private companies that held the very contracts they had overseen in government, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Companies hired former officials for their security clearances, government relationships, and knowledge of procurement processes. Those officials then used their connections to win contracts for their new employers, while current government officials viewed the revolving door as a future career pathway — creating an incentive to maintain friendly relationships with contractors rather than exercise rigorous oversight.
"Top Secret America" demonstrated that the intelligence revolving door was not a series of isolated individual transitions but a structural feature of a system designed to blur the boundary between public intelligence and private profit. The investigation found that the system had grown so large and complex that even the Director of National Intelligence could not fully account for its scope, creating what amounted to a parallel government operating substantially outside democratic accountability.