Should the US Create a Domestic Intelligence Agency?

When the FBIs COINTELPRO came under fire from the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1976), one of the major problems to emerge from the Congressional investigation was that the FBI had been illegally spying on Americans. The revelation was a major embarrassment for the intelligence community at the time, as the anger of the American public had already reached a boiling point with respect to Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the major assassinations of the 1960s. In the post-9/11 world, the conversation over whether the US should have a domestic intelligence agency that is legally permitted to spy on citizens has emerged. Indeed in the decades that have passed since the shake-up of the intelligence community in the 1970s that saw James Angleton ousted from his counterintelligence post at the CIA, the American public has been conditioned to view safety and security as more important than individual freedoms and rights (Valentine, 2014). The

Defining Domestic Intelligence Agency

The definition of intelligence has broadened since the formal inception of the American intelligence community. Since the 1950s it has moved on from obtaining and analyzing information about adversaries to disseminating false information (counter-intelligence) to engaging in psy-ops (psychological warfare) against adversaries (such as the Phoenix Program in Vietnam) to engaging in black ops (off the books operations) against American citizens (as in Operation CHAOS) (Valentine, 2014). Intelligence in the US has never been strictly defined but rather used as a catch-all, umbrella appellation to justify various actions related to national security (National Counterintelligence and Security Center Strategy 2018-2022, 2018). Defining the term domestic intelligence, however, is important because the term refers to something new within the intelligence communityan agency whose focus is not on external adversaries and threats to US national security but rather an agency whose focus is on internal adversaries and threats. Jackson (2009) defines domestic intelligence as any effort by government organizations to gather, assess, and act on information about individuals or organizations in the United States or U.S. persons elsewhere that are not related to the investigation of a known past criminal act or specific planned criminal activity (pp. 3-4). While law enforcement agencies routinely collect information that is not directly linked to a crime, the purpose of doing so is to prevent future crime (Jackson, 2009). For a domestic intelligence agency, the collection of information would consist of explorative activity [that] inherently involves gathering a broader spectrum of data about...

5). In other words, domestic intelligence would be similar to a giant tech company, like Google, collecting information on individuals, harvesting that information and compiling the Big Data into data warehouses, and retrieving that data for analysis when deemed appropriate. One could potentially make the case, in fact, that the Big Tech companies of today are already acting in some capacity as a wing of a surreptitious domestic intelligence agency.

Existing US Legal Framework: Why No Domestic Intelligence Agency Exists and What Would Need to Change to be Able to Create One

Domestic intelligence in the US does not formerly exist under the roof of one agency, though domestic intelligence is gathered by various agencies as it pertains to their work. Law enforcement, for example, collects information that might help to prevent future crime. The difference between law enforcement and intelligence, however, is that law enforcement focuses on prosecution, whereas intelligence agencies focus on collecting information for the sake of serving national security interests. Still, multiple state...

…UK. Outlawing guns in the US would fly in the face of American culture so badly that people would surely revolt and there would be chaos. The right to bear arms is, after all, protected by the Constitution in the 2nd Amendment. Just like Americans have the right to privacy, they also have the right to own guns. England does not permit its own citizens this right. Does America really want to become like England? There are cultural lines that must not be crossed in the name of security and safety. American culture is something that American citizens feel very strongly about. It is not the same as German culture, English culture or Australian culture. It is its own system of ethics, morals and values that is distinctly American and interwoven with the laws of the Constitution. One reason changing the Constitution is so difficult is that the Founding Fathers understood what an alteration to those original set of laws would mean, and they did not want that process taken lightly or abused. They wanted there to be a clear consensus among the public and the represenatives elected to vote on behalf of that public.

In short, though other nations of the world have their own domestic intelligence agencies, they also have their own heritage, history and culture. What makes Americas heritage and history unique is its development of the US Constitution. If Americas governmental leaders want to take the nation in a new direction, they must do so lawfully. To change requires cultural alteration. It requires the American public to line up and support the kind of legal change that would be needed to justify the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency. Unless such a cultural change is effected, it is difficult to see the freedom-loving American public accepting a…