When James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he rejected one of the central criticisms in the WaPo’s Top Secret America series–that the redundancy in the Intelligence Community contributed to waste and intelligence failures.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that his first act as DNI is to add to the redundancy.

That guy who used to use parliamentary maneuvers to be an out-and-out shit and get a lot of credibility for being a “Maverick”? He’s back.

On Monday it’s expected that the Washington Post will debut a series by Dana Priest on military contractors, with an emphasis on intelligence contracting. We’ve known for some time there are far more contractors than troops, that we don’t know the exact number — which makes for a lot of interesting questions.

I’m amused by the panic revealed in a memo the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a few weeks ago preparing all members of the intelligence community for an upcoming Dana Priest series covering the same terrain.

It’s a weird thing, this futurist scenario prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While it recognizes the real threat of the rising neo-feudalist world, it seems more worried about whether the intelligence community will be able to exert the power it does today than about what it means for people more generally.