When it comes to the national-security state, the era of big government never ended. As the Edward Snowden revelations and copious other disclosures have shown us over the years, the vast secret state that hums quietly beneath Washington has only grown over the past few decades. But though we get the occasional glimpse of the machine, we’re largely in the dark when it comes to its size and how exactly it operates.

One of those glimpses was recently provided to the public by William Arkin, former US intelligence analyst and veteran journalist who has reported for papers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and served for decades as an analyst for NBC until 2019, when he quit over the network’s increasing militarism under Trump. In a May piece for Newsweek, Arkin exposed the highly classified “signature reduction” program, and the “secret undercover army” of tens of thousands that operates under it, sometimes under the US public’s very noses. Jacobin spoke to him about what he found.