Pssst! Hey! The Washington Post wants to let you in on a little secret called Top Secret America.

Apparently, the government counter terrorism movement that emerged after 9-11 manages to be both hugely unwieldly and top secret. The hub of Top Secret America is around Washington D.C.:

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign...

...Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

But Top Secret America encompasses more than just this area—Top Secret America is everywhere. The problem, according to the Washington Post, is that Top Secret America has grown so vast that no one knows just how much it costs or who's in charge of what.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

The article charges that the inefficiencies—the redundancies—of Top Secret America kept multiple agencies from intercepting a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as he boarded an Amsterdam flight bound for Detroit late last year with explosives in his underwear—even though Abdulmatallab's father had contacted the U.S. embassy in Nigeria, fearing that his son had become a radical and was planning an attack.

America's vast network of counter terrorist networks didn't stop Abdulmutallab from setting off his underwear explosives—other passengers on the flight did.

Top Secret America, ladies and gentlemen. (SHHHHHH!)