Today's column:

Last year's embarrassing leak of spy-budget details gave insight into just how lucrative the business of federal contracting has become since the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2003 start of the Iraq war.

At a Colorado conference sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, a PowerPoint slide revealed that 70 percent of intelligence dollars go not to government employees or agencies, but to private companies such as SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton.

On her blog, The Spy Who Billed Me, journalist and novelist R.J. Hillhouse used conference information to figure that the U.S. intelligence budget is $60 billion - almost a fourth higher than people thought.

The question now for Maryland and other regions swimming in the money is: How long can it continue? The apparent answer from the politically connected Carlyle Group: a while.

Washington-based Carlyle is buying a majority stake in Booz Allen's government contracting arm, which does secret work for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade and has been called "the shadow intelligence community," for $2.5 billion.

"We like it and think budgets will continue to grow," Peter Clare, head of Carlyle's aerospace and defense business, says of the kind of high-tech intelligence and security work that Booz does. "We'd like to invest further in this area."

Read the whole thing Here. Read Washington Post biz columnist Steve Pearstein's take on the Carlyle/Booz deal Here.