Intelligence Services Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Intelligence services undertake counter intelligence operations, monitor internal security, make and break codes, or conduct covert operations. Some specialize in gather in information from open sources, espionage, or domestic surveillance activities to produce secret intelligence reports for government officials, members of the armed forces, or the intelligence service itself. During the past half century, technical collection systems involving imagery captured by satellites in low-earth orbit and reconnaissance aircraft, signals intelligence (intercepted communications), and measurement and signatures intelligence, which characterizes and identifies various electronic and industrial systems, have come to play a dominant role in the creation of intelligence estimates and reporting. The rise of transnational criminal-terrorist networks, however, has placed a premium on human intelligence, especially information gathered by metropolitan police forces.

Intelligence services have existed in one form or another throughout history. Today, the best-known intelligence services are maintained by national governments, although state, local, and even corporate intelligence agencies are becoming increasingly prevalent and important. The information revolution has created opportunities for subnational and private organizations to produce tailored intelligence reporting and improved situational awareness by fusing and then analyzing data from a variety of sources. The New York City Police Department, for instance, maintains liaison officers with foreign municipalities and publishes the NYPD Shield, an intelligence bulletin for the law enforcement community. Corporate intelligence organizations provide risk assessments related to a firm’s assets or interests while identifying immediate threats to ongoing operations or corporate personnel. Commercial enterprises also offer risk analysis and clipping services to help their clients identify business opportunities and gauge investment risks.

The U.S. intelligence services are nominally under the control of the director of national intelligence (DNI). Created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the DNI’s primary purpose is to coordinate the activities of the organizations that constitute the U.S. intelligence community. The National Intelligence Council and the National Counterterrorism Center are part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Central Intelligence Agency continues as an independent organization, although the community-wide role once played by the director of central intelligence has now been taken over by the DNI. The Coast Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Departments of Justice, State, Energy, and Homeland Security all maintain specialized intelligence services. Most of this intelligence community, however, is actually lodged within the Department of Defense. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corp intelligence agencies are all part of the Department of Defense.

Oversight of intelligence services and the concentration of police and political power in intelligence agencies vary widely. The division of labor between organizations that gather foreign intelligence and domestic police authorities often was used as a metric of democratic freedoms enjoyed within states. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes often use their intelligence and law enforcement agencies as an instrument of state terror, helping to keep a ruling party, clique, or dictator in power. No distinction is made between foreign and domestic threats; both are often subject to scrutiny by the same organization. Under these circumstances, intelligence services and government oversight become indistinct, creating a counterintelligence state. The United States, by contrast, has utilized both congressional and judicial oversight of the intelligence community, an arm of the executive branch of the federal government. Domestic intelligence activities also are regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires a showing of cause either ex ante or ex post for surveillance actions undertaken against individuals and careful record keeping to facilitate oversight and accountability. In addition, the United States traditionally maintains boundaries between the activities of foreign intelligence organizations (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency) and domestic counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investigation). These boundaries between foreign domestic and intelligence–law enforcement activities were actually exploited by al-Qaida in the months leading up to the September 11 attacks. The U.S. government agencies found it difficult to coordinate the flow of information and analysis across bureaucratic boundaries, especially when the opponent seemed to move across international borders with ease. The fact that terrorists found it easy to hide in plain sight, blending into local populations while they planned and trained for their operation, highlighted the need to better fuse and disseminate information gathered from foreign intelligence services and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

Intelligence reforms in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks have exacerbated the tensions created by the existence of secret organizations within democracy. Indeed, one of the chief externalities of globalization has been the blurring of the distinction between foreign intelligence operations and domestic law enforcement activities. The ability of transnational actors to operate across international boundaries has forced domestic law enforcement agencies and foreign intelligence services to share information. In the United States, this collaboration, however, is constrained by the limited ability of law enforcement agencies to maintain dossiers on individuals or groups in the absence of probable cause, a limit that does not affect the actions of U.S. foreign intelligence services that have only a limited interest in the future legal prosecution of their foreign intelligence targets. Proponents and opponents of increased government domestic surveillance also struggle to strike a balance between the need to increase domestic surveillance and the need to protect citizens’ rights to privacy. For example, it is difficult to reconcile monitoring domestic communications or data mining in an open-ended search for anomalies that might indicate nefarious activity with individuals’ right to privacy. It is impossible to show cause against individuals living in the United States who might be communicating with al-Qaida if their identities are unknown and evidence of the communication has to be uncovered by sifting through the phone calls of everyone in the United States. Resolving these sorts of issues promises to fuel future debate about the proper role of intelligence services.

Bibliography:

Betts, Richard. Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
George, Roger Z., and James B. Bruce, eds. Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles and Innovations. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008.
Johnson, Loch K., and James J.Wirtz, eds. Intelligence and National Security: The Secret World of Spies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lowenthal, Mark. Intelligence from Secrets to Policy. 4th ed.Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2008.
Richelson, Jeffrey T. The U.S. Intelligence Community. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2007.

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