The Geek Labyrinth

The most frightening thing about our unfathomably complex intelligence bureaucracy.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, July 22, 2010, at 6:18 PM ET

Don't believe the cynics, the lazybones, the tree-full-of-owls academics, or the apparatchik-apologists who dismiss it as simplistic, pointless, wrongheaded, or dangerous. The Washington Post's three-part series this week on "Top Secret America" is as important as the paper's PR campaign suggests. (Disclosure: The Washington Post Co. owns Slate.)

The culmination of a two-year probe by Dana Priest, one of the country's best military reporters, and William M. Arkin, a national-security sleuth of unparalleled ingenuity, the series lays out—in (occasionally numbing) detail—the vast proliferation of supersecret enterprises, and the compartmentalized security clearances that go with them, since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.