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Sugar Grove, West Virginia, where the NSA can monitor all communications entering the Eastern U.S.

Top secret America isn’t just a Fort Meade of the mind. It’s an actual space, albeit an unusual one, occupying tens of thousands of acres in about 10,000 locations around the country. The shiny office parks and non-descript rural buildings house impressive statistics: 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies, and countless sensor networks, slurping up data from the air and the cloud; in Washington, DC, alone, about 17 million square feet, the size of about three Pentagons, or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings, is devoted to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence-gathering.

Liberty Crossing in McLean, Va. (Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

It’s an alternative geography, as Dana Preist and William M. Arkin describe it in their Washington Post report last year (and in a recently aired Frontline documentary, below), made of more than just the sort of places that can’t be seen on Google Maps. A spy sandbox born the night of September 11, 2001, Top Secret America has evolved into an array of non-descript architecture that forms a modern day Garrison State.

The Post report contained no bombshells, nor does the documentary. And neither dives in very far to the sticky, complexities of spying on American citizens. Priest and Arkin focus on the meta-concerns – about overload, redundancy, waste, scale and sheer secrecy. Consider that right now, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, are tracking the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. The WaPo report includes a nine page list of domestic airborne intelligence contractors. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. No wonder people like the Underwear Bomber or the Times Square bomber have slipped through the net.

The National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va. (Washington Post photo by Melina Mara)

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will be the third-largest government building in the Washington, D.C. area. (Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

Priest and Arkin asked retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq, what he thought of the government’s method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. “I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

A map of domestic intelligence contractors. (Flickr / TheElectoralMap)

Amidst all of the talk of spending sprees, recent budget woes may be tempering the high tech intelligence bonanza. The largest government complex ever planned – the Department of Homeland Security’s $3.4-billion renovation of the dilapidated, castle-like 1855 Government Hospital for the Insane, outside Washington, DC — has ended up stalled as Congress tried to cut the federal deficit. As a result, Homeland Security employees will remain scattered across more than 35 offices around Washington.

The National Reconnaissance Office, Fairfax County, Maryland, Virginia. (Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

Total publicity sucks (ask a post-Wikileaks Hillary Clinton or a disgruntled Facebook paramour), but the opposite is also dangerous. It’s hard to know what all of this money has bought, and what it actually costs, and not just in dollars. Ten years since 9/11, what’s clear is that, after unprecedented spending and growth, a hidden America of surveillance drones, data mining, and the blank architecture of countless gray sites, is now considered an essential weapon in the war on terror. Not so clear is whether the U.S. as a country knows how to wield this kind of hammer – or if the problem is even a nail.

“Top Secret America”:

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.