Intelligence services: The new leviathan

last updated 8 January 2015

Bigger doesn’t always mean better, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Further proof of that truism could be found last week in The Washington Post’s three-part exposé of the U.S. intelligence industry, which since 9/11 has ballooned into a sprawling “intelligence leviathan.” Federal spending on intelligence has more than doubled, and there are now 854,000 people with “Top Secret” security clearance employed at some 3,000 different intelligence agencies and private firms, at a cost to taxpayers of some $75 billion annually. This bloated bureaucracy isn’t necessarily keeping us safer, said Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post. There is so much redundancy in the system, so much “wasteful duplication of effort,” that all these agencies have wound up competing rather than cooperating.

The Post’s series was a politically motivated hit job, said Rowan Scarborough in Human Events Online. During the 1990s, the Clinton administration left the intelligence agencies broken, underfunded, and demoralized, just as Osama bin Laden was creating al Qaida. After 9/11, the Bush administration saw the “urgent need for unique expertise,” and brought in private contractors with specialized skills, created new computer systems and satellites, and expanded the CIA and National Security Agency. It was a “robust response by a nation at war,” and the interception of terrorist communications, data mining, and other sophisticated intelligence programs surely stopped many subsequent attacks from succeeding. In counterterrorism, redundancy can be “a good thing,” said Dan Drezner in ForeignPolicy.com. Having multiple agencies working independently to identify threats greatly reduces the risk that any particular threat will be missed.

That sounds good in theory, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. But in practice, the intelligence industry has become so “crushingly complex” that no single agency—let alone a single individual—has a clear picture of who is responsible for what. Which intelligence programs are producing useful information? Which aren’t? Does one agency have pieces of a puzzle that another agency is missing? High-ranking government officials admit that no one really knows. And since everything in this massive new subculture is top secret, it’s nearly impossible for Congress or other outsiders to conduct a real top-to-bottom review. Our intelligence-gathering system has “spiraled out of control,” and we may one day come to regret it.