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In July of 2010, The Washington Post published an expose on the massive growth of our nation’s intelligence system.

It’s an article that everyone should read. And I warn you that you’ll want to set aside some time. It’s long, but goes in depth about the expense, the magnitude, and the waste at the time they published their story.

They came to the following conclusion:

The government has built a national security and intelligence system so big, so complex and so hard to manage, no one really knows if it’s fulfilling its most important purpose: keeping citizens safe.

While some may think that it’s old news, I think it should be reviewed for the naivety of us all at the time it was published. The reporters and the public were overwhelmingly trusting in our government that the massive building and spending was being done to gather intelligence on foreign and domestic threats to our safety.

This was before Edward Snowden revealed that the intelligence network now in place (and still being built) is not only monitoring foreigners and known domestic threats, but has been conducting massive metadata gathering operations on everyone in the U.S.

Read TOP SECRET AMERICA

Those of us who thought we could never be suspect and under the eye of Big Brother have found out that might be. Our phone conversations, emails, Google searches, and Internet social network activities are all reviewed and stored, thanks to our own tax dollars paying for an intelligence gathering monster that is in a feeding frenzy. We can be monitored, scanned, and tracked with relative ease.

And thanks to our failure to recognize and stop the worst piece of legislation that gutted the Constitution, we now have the inappropriately named, “Patriot Act” that can find us arrested and locked away indefinitely without access to a lawyer, or a phone call. No right to a speedy trial. No rights.

Meanwhile, government funded programs that train young men and women to fly drones is going full throttle and the Federal Budget continues to fund intelligence programs with increasing amounts of money.