U.S. debates creating domestic intelligence agency

Should the United States have a domestic intelligence agency? “If America’s counterterrorism-focused domestic intelligence, broadly conceived, is found wanting — and how to do better while preserving civil liberties is the policy challenge — changing organizations is one approach,” said Gregory Treverton, director of the RAND Corp.’s Center for Global Risk and Security and author of the report, during a Capitol Hill briefing on Tuesday. There are other ways, however, to improve counterterrorism activities that should be considered, including revising laws, spending more money to enhance existing capabilities, and improving leadership or the means for sharing information, he said, reports GovExec’s Katherine McIntire Peters.

RAND wrote the report at the request of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. This followed a Congressional direction to the department to conduct “an independent study on the feasibility of creating a counterterrorism intelligence agency.” The request stemmed from the failure of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. Peters writes that RAND was not asked to make recommendations or to evaluate the performance of any existing agencies or programs. Instead, but was rather asked to consider whether a new organization could improve current domestic intelligence operations. The concerns it was to examine centered around the perceptions that the FBI is dominated by a law enforcement and case-based approach to terrorism; the FBI and the CIA do not talk to each other; too much poor-quality information is collected, and collection efforts are uncoordinated; analysis is fragmented; and it is difficult to move information across the domestic intelligence enterprise.

Peters notes that among the challenges RAND faced in writing the report was the fact that the FBI is undergoing its own transformation in the wake of 9/11. Its budget doubled from $3.1 billion in 2001 to $6.4 billion in 2008 and the agency created a National Security Branch to focus on prevention and intelligence in the counterterrorism mission. An evaluation of the effectiveness of those recently implemented changes would be useful before considering a new approach, Treverton said.

The United States does not have a domestic intelligence agency devoted to counterterrorism, but a number of programs exist within agencies aimed at detecting and preventing domestic terrorist attacks. The FBI has both domestic intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities and the CIA, DHS, and National Counterterrorism Center all have roles, as do state and municipal organizations. Treverton noted in his testimony that domestic intelligence and law enforcement both involve the investigation of tips and other information about suspicious behavior, but while law enforcement is focused on specific cases, domestic intelligence also includes exploratory activities that serve a broader warning function by building a strategic understanding of the domestic threat environment. It is an area ripe for clashes with civil liberties and one that makes many Americans uncomfortable.

“What is it that we want from domestic intelligence for counterterrorism?” Treverton asks. “Do we want every tip pursued?” That’s probably not realistic, and it’s not clear that a new agency or even a new organization within an existing agency would address lawmakers’ concerns about the current means for gathering domestic intelligence, he said. Government reorganizations often fail because they reflect the competing interests and political goals of their creators, and there is little consensus about how a domestic intelligence agency should operate. “Clarity of mission is key,” whether that mission resides in an existing organization or a new one, Treverton said.

RAND’s analysis focused on the two most obvious alternatives to the status quo:

• The first is to combine functions of existing agencies into a separate agency with a relationship to the Justice Department, similar to the one the FBI has now
• The second alternative is to create an agency within an existing agency, most likely within the FBI or perhaps within DHS.

RAND sought to establish the framework for a break-even analysis that would examine how much a new agency would have to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks to justify costs, both tangible and intangible, such as the impingement on civil liberties. For example, if it costs $500 million to create a domestic intelligence agency, to break even, the new service would have to reduce the nation’s risk of terrorism by 50 percent if the annual risk were assumed be $1 billion. If the terrorism risk were assumed to be $10 billion, then the new agency would have to reduce that risk only by 5 percent to break even. “What this analysis shows is that the choice turns on what level of terrorism risk is assessed or assumed, topics on which experts and policy makers differ considerably,” Treverton said.