But we are now into the second decade of the expansion of intelligence work that began after Sept. 11, 2001.
The expansionist policies of the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, and Japan in the 1930s, and especially the outbreak of World War II in 1939, precipitated the creation and expansion of intelligence services throughout the world.
By Nicholas Schmidle August 7, 2017 Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, has overseen an apparent expansion of Russian intelligence operations in the U.S. In December of last year, two Russian intelligence officers met in the Washington, D.C., area with a potential source they hoped had valuable information regarding the inner workings of the Obama White House.
Inside the United States, in the meantime, Putin has overseen an apparent expansion of Russian intelligence operations.
The rapid expansion of the intelligence bureaucracy has been under particular scrutiny this week, with a series of articles in The Washington Post detailing the growth in spending on spy programs since the Sept. 11 attacks.
To continue its support, the Obama administration is expected to announce a $311 million plan for the expansion of joint intelligence units that concentrate on money laundering, as well as additional training for judges, prosecutors and the police.
This is in addition to the vast expansion of "political intelligence" firms whose sole purpose is to follow important events in Washington and analyze them for people who have the capacity to pay a lot for the information.
Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage, by Joseph E. Persico (Random House, $15.95), is a chronicle of how secret operations, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt's expansion of the Allied intelligence network, helped change the course of the war.
These resources are getting even better, with the expansion of improved artificial intelligence in search engines.
Analyst firm MarketsandMarkets says machine learning will be the biggest component in the explosive expansion of the artificial-intelligence market, projected to reach $5.5 billion by 2020, with 50percentt compound annual growth.
But you can also see the expansion of our quest for intelligence as exhilarating.
