The U.S. intelligence community should continue to provide intelligence support to national leaders even in the event of a catastrophic emergency, according to a new Intelligence Community Directive.

“IC elements shall develop and maintain COOP [continuity of operations] capabilities to ensure the uninterrupted flow of national intelligence and, through the support of COG [continuity of government], the continuation of National Essential Functions,” the Directive states.

The capability to provide continuity of operations depends in part on the geographical dispersion of leadership, staff, communications and facilities.

“The IC provides timely, insightful, objective, and relevant national intelligence to the President… and other national leaders… wherever they are located and under all conditions,” the Directive affirmed. See Intelligence Community Continuity Program, Intelligence Community Directive 118, November 12, 2013.

The new Directive implements the Bush Administration’s 2007 National Security Presidential Directive 51 on “National Continuity Policy.” Presidential directives remain in force unless or until they are superseded or rescinded.

The latest report from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community provides an updated (and largely redacted) snapshot of the IG’s investigative agenda.

During the nine-month period from July 2012 to March 2013, the IC IG internal hotline received 70 contacts or complaints from intelligence agency personnel, as well as 77 contacts from the general public.

Investigators conducted 75 investigations revealing some occasionally creative forms of misconduct. In one case, an ODNI employee “was operating a personal website on Government time using Government systems through which he solicited and received donations.” Another ODNI employee “attempted to improperly obtain a security clearance for a private citizen through the use of a no-cost contract.”

Three cases of suspected unauthorized disclosures were closed when they were found to be unsubstantiated. Two investigations of unauthorized disclosures remained open as of March 31.

Last month, IC Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III told Congress that his office could not perform an investigation of NSA surveillance programs because it lacked the resources to do so.

“While my office has the jurisdiction to conduct an IC-wide review of all IC elements using these authorities,” Mr. McCullough wrote in a November 5 letter to Senator Leahy and others, “such a review will implicate ongoing oversight efforts. Therefore, I have been conferring with several IC Inspectors General Forum members in order to consider how such a review might be accomplished given the potential impact to IG resources and ongoing projects.”

Recent unauthorized disclosures of classified information might have been prevented if U.S. intelligence agencies “continuously evaluated the backgrounds of employees and contractors,” according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

In its new report on the FY 2014 intelligence authorization bill, the Committee would require intelligence agencies to “continuously determine whether their employees and contractors are eligible for access to classified information” by using all available transactional records and social media.

“Continuous evaluation allows the IC to take advantage of lawfully available government and public information to detect warning signals that the current system of five-year periodic reinvestigation misses,” the HPSCI report said.

“That information might include: foreign travel; reports of foreign contacts financial disclosure information; checks of criminal, commercial marketing, and credit databases; and other appropriate publicly available information.”

The recently developed concept of continuous evaluation (CE) “allows for a review at any time of an individual with eligibility or access to classified information or in a sensitive position to ensure that that individual continues to meet the requirements for eligibility,” said Brian Prioletti of the ODNI National Counterintelligence Executive at a November 13 hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“As envisioned in the reformed security clearance process, [continuous evaluation] includes automated record checks of commercial databases, government databases, and other information lawfully available,” Mr. Prioletti said. “Manual checks are inefficient and resource-intensive. The C.E. initiative currently under development will enable us to more reliably determine an individual’s eligibility to hold a security clearance or a sensitive position on an ongoing basis.”

“There are a number of ongoing pilot studies to assess the feasibility of selected automated record checks and the utility of publicly available electronic information to include social media sites in the personnel security process,” he added.

“While we fully recognize the value of publicly available electronic information and its relevancy from an adjudicative perspective, there are resource, privacy, and civil liberty concerns that must be addressed as we incorporate such checks into our security processes,” Mr. Prioletti acknowledged.

Up Next: Continuous Monitoring

“Continuous evaluation” itself is just an interim stage, said Gregory Marshall, chief security officer at the Department of Homeland Security.  It is a stepping stone to the desired end state of “continuous monitoring,” which involves more extensive collection directed at the individual subject. [Update: This is a non-standard use of the term “continuous monitoring,” which normally refers to monitoring of information systems, not persons.]

“This administration’s recent information-sharing and safeguarding initiative, also known as Insider Threat, seeks to complement background investigations and continuous evaluation with continuous monitoring,” Mr. Marshall said. “This program will incorporate and analyze data in near-real time from a much broader set of sources. Its focus is the protection of classified information but its applicability to suitability and contractor fitness is evident.”

Indeed, the “applicability” of this approach to all sorts of concerns is evident. If leaks of national security information are deemed to be a counterintelligence threat, why wouldn’t the full arsenal of surveillance tools, including the NSA’s PRISM, be employed against them?

An NSA memorandum reported in the Huffington Post today noted that “vulnerabilities of character” revealed through intelligence gathering can be effectively used to discredit individual “radicalizers.”  In one particularly horrifying case, it was found that a suspect “publishes articles without checking facts.” (“Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit ‘Radicalizers’,” by Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim, November 26).

The Director of National Intelligence recently ordered a review to see whether the number of persons who hold security clearances — nearly 5 million persons — could be reduced. (“Obama Administration Looks to Scrub Security Clearance List” by Josh Gerstein, Politico, November 21).

That objective could be inadvertently advanced by efforts to ratchet up personnel security procedures. Facing continuous evaluation and the prospect of continuous monitoring, some individuals might decide to opt out of the security clearance system voluntarily.

The Director of National Intelligence yesterday declassified and released hundreds of pages of records concerning collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, illuminating the origins of bulk collection of email metadata, as well as interactions with the FISA Court and Congress.

“We will make the information public that we can make public, and we will be more transparent about this than has ever been the case in history,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney at an October 28 news briefing.  “That is already true.  We have released more information about what the NSA [does] than has ever been released before.”

By themselves, the latest disclosures (provided in response to FOIA litigation brought by ACLU and EFF) are unlikely to resolve ongoing disputes about NSA intelligence gathering. The legitimacy of bulk collection of email and telephone metadata may ultimately be more of a value judgment rather than a factual or legal one. At a minimum, perhaps the new documents will provide a more substantial basis for informed debate.

But there is disagreement even about that.

“Some would like to believe these disclosures have started a debate about the propriety and efficacy of NSA surveillance programs but, in fact, to a substantial degree, recent unauthorized disclosures have ended the debate because, once disclosed, the programs at issue become substantially less effective,” according to a November 12 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The nation will suffer as a result.”

The Public Interest Declassification Board will hold an open meeting at the National Archives on Thursday, November 21. The Board proposes to focus on prioritizing topics and events for declassification. The intended emphasis is on declassification of historical records, but it need not be limited to that.

Although willful abuse of classification authority is not unheard of, there seems to be no case in which it has ever been penalized. “I am extremely concerned that the integrity of the classification system continues to be severely undermined by the complete absence of accountability in instances such as this clear abuse of classification authority,” wrote J. William Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, in an October 18 letter. He was responding to the controversial classification of evidence concerning the defilement of human remains in Afghanistan.  See Marine Corps fight escalates over handling of case involving troops urinating on corpses, Washington Post, November 15;  and Marine Corps Commandant Accused of Improper Classification, Secrecy News, July 30.

“The increasing pace and adoption of global scientific and technological discovery heighten the risk of strategic or tactical surprise and, over time, reduce the advantages of our intelligence capabilities,” according to a new report on U.S. intelligence research and development programs prepared by a congressionally-mandated Commission.

“Foreign countries’ growing expertise and proficiency in a number of emerging or potentially disruptive technologies and industries–gained either by improving their own capabilities, by using surreptitious methods, or by taking advantage of an erosion of U.S. capabilities and U.S. control over critical supply chains–have the potential to cause great harm to the national security of the United States and its allies,” the report said.

In order to adapt, the report said, the US intelligence community will need to place renewed emphasis on scientific and technical intelligence; improve coordination and management of competing collection and analysis programs; and accelerate the production of actionable intelligence, among other recommended steps.

See the Report of the National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the United States Intelligence Community, Unclassified Version, released November 2013 (NYT, WP).

The Commission also produced a White Paper on The IC’s Role Within U.S. Cyber R&D.

Disclosure of U.S. intelligence surveillance activities in Germany and other allied countries has aroused angry public reaction in those countries, and has prompted discussion of the possibility of negotiating “no spy zones” abroad in which certain types of intelligence collection would be renounced and prohibited.

Some have spoken of extending to Germany or other countries the “Five Eyes” agreement that has long existed among the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to share intelligence, and not to spy on each other.

But a rarely-noted statute could make it difficult for any U.S. administration to achieve an international agreement involving binding new limits on intelligence collection against a foreign country, unless Congress enacts the limitation itself.

In the FY 2001 intelligence authorization act (P.L. 106-567, sect. 308), Congress said that the imperatives of U.S. intelligence gathering are to be understood to take precedence over any treaty or international agreement:

“No Federal law enacted on or after the date of the enactment of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 that implements a treaty or other international agreement shall be construed as making unlawful an otherwise lawful and authorized intelligence activity of the United States Government or its employees, or any other person to the extent such other person is carrying out such activity on behalf of, and at the direction of, the United States, unless such Federal law specifically addresses such intelligence activity.”

By way of explanation, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a 2000 report:  “There has been a concern that future legislation implementing international agreements could be interpreted…. as restricting intelligence activities that are otherwise entirely consistent with U.S. law and policy.”

At a minimum, this provision appears to complicate any such restriction on intelligence activities that is advanced by international agreement, unless it is explicitly affirmed by Congress itself.

The notion of creating and incrementally expanding “no spy” zones has some history.  In a 1996 op-ed, for example, former U.S. Ambassador Robert E. White proposed that the U.S. explore the possibility on a trial basis:

“One reform might be to select a specific region of the world — for example, Central America — as a testing place. Withdraw all CIA staff from these countries. Let the National Security Council charge our career diplomats with fulfilling Washington’s intelligence requirements. Should Foreign Service officers prove capable of meeting all intelligence needs, then gradually extend this beneficial practice to other countries through pacts of reciprocal restraint by which signatories agree not to spy on or engage in covert action against the other. In order to be eligible to sign such a pact with the United States, the other nation would have to meet minimal standards of openness.”  (“Call Off The Spies,” Washington Post, February 7, 1996).

But even in the post-cold war, pre-9/11 interlude, this proposal did not find a receptive audience, and no such experiment was attempted.

“Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not.” That’s what a Top Secret National Security Agency document says, as reported by the New York Times over the weekend (“No Morsel Too Minuscule for NSA” by Scott Shane, November 2).

But the list of things that U.S. intelligence agencies will not do to support the collection of foreign intelligence is likely to be shorter than the list of things that they will.  Gathering intelligence means stealing secrets that another country (or other entity) does not wish to reveal.  Towards that end, various forms of bribery, burglary, robbery, coercion and other crimes are tacitly understood to be permitted.

In the CIA clandestine service, “hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated efforts by foreign governments to catch them,” as a 1996 report from the House Intelligence Committee memorably explained (IC 21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, Chapter IX, at p. 205).

“A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [CIA Directorate of Operations] officers engage in highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself,” the 1996 House report said. “In other words, a typical 28 year old, GS-11 case officer has numerous opportunities every week, by poor tradecraft or inattention, to embarrass his country and President and to get agents imprisoned or executed.”

When secrecy cannot be assured, those risks are magnified nearly everywhere that intelligence collection takes place.

As DNI James Clapper said at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee last week, “there are many things we do in intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback…. the conduct of intelligence is premised on the notion that we can do it secretly and we don’t count on it being revealed in the newspaper.”

“The intelligence community must acknowledge how difficult it is to keep secrets today,” said ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt in a speech last week.

“In determining what activities to undertake we need to give more consideration to what the impact of additional leaks would be,” Mr. Litt said. “In each case we have to assess, to a greater extent than we have to date– is the game worth the candle?”

 

In 1973, the Director of Central Intelligence ordered CIA officials to prepare a descriptive account of all CIA activities that were “outside the legislative charter of this Agency,” which is to say unauthorized or illegal.  The purpose of the exercise was to identify operations that had “flap potential,” meaning that they could embarrass the Agency or embroil it in controversy.

The resulting 700-page CIA compendium of unlawful domestic surveillance, wiretapping, mail opening and detention actions became known as “the family jewels.”  It helped to inform and to substantiate the investigations of intelligence in the 1970s.  The document was finally declassified (with some redactions) in 2007 and was released to the National Security Archive, which has posted it here.

In a new book entitled “The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power” (University of Texas Press, 2013), historian John Prados reviews the origins and consequences of the family jewels document and the operations described in it.

The thrust of Prados’ book is that the CIA family jewels are not simply relics of a discrete historical period, but rather that they are exemplars of a recurring pattern of intelligence misconduct. Many of the specific abuses of the 1970s, he argues, can be understood as archetypes that have been manifested repeatedly, up to the present day.

As a category, “family jewels,” then and now, involve violations of legal or moral norms, shielded by official secrecy. These operations tend to expand in scope until secrecy fails, for one reason or another, and then the public controversy which had been deferred explodes with redoubled force.

“Family Jewels are characterized by activity that goes beyond [legal] boundaries, refusal to rein in the operators, and then covering up the behavior.” (p. 57)  “One crucial aspect is that projects are relatively easy to initiate, but then very difficult to shut down.” (p. 321)

“Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all is that Family Jewels seem to have a tendency to replicate, suggesting that abuse fulfills some functional purpose.” (p. 322)

So, according to Prados, unlawful domestic surveillance in the Vietnam era returns as extralegal surveillance in the war on terror. The abusive interrogation of a suspected CIA mole in the 1960s finds an echo in the  CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation practices. All the while, secrecy and selective disclosure are used to shape and manage public perceptions.

“There was a logic to the way Family Jewels evolved,” he writes, and his interesting new book elaborates on that theme.

*    *    *

Postscript:  It was startling to be reminded by Prados that the Federation of American Scientists was on the CIA “watch list” to have its mail intercepted and read by the Agency in the 1960s and early 1970s, along with the American Friends Service Committee, author John Steinbeck, and other questionable types (p. 75).

In 1971, then-FAS President Jeremy J. Stone triggered high-level anxiety at CIA when he wrote a letter to the Postal Service inquiring whether “any other agency” was being permitted to open U.S. mail. The letter generated intense deliberations among CIA leadership, and the program was terminated two years later.  Stone presented his account of that episode in a chapter of his memoirs here.  See also “The CIA’s Mail Cover: FAS Nearly Uncovered It,” by Robert Gillette, Science, June 27, 1975.

Total U.S. intelligence spending last year declined by more than 10%.

Intelligence spending has been on a downward slope for the last few years since its peak in 2010.  But last year’s drop, disclosed yesterday in newly declassified budget data for FY2013, was the steepest one-year decline in intelligence spending since at least the end of the Cold War, and maybe longer.

The reduction in spending was accelerated by the budget sequester which deprived intelligence agencies of billions of dollars beyond the intent of congressional appropriators, who were already cutting intelligence spending anyway.

The Director of National Intelligence said that the 2013 budget appropriation for the National Intelligence Program was $52.7 billion, but that it was reduced by sequester to $49.0 billion.

The Department of Defense disclosed that the 2013 budget for the Military Intelligence Program was $19.2 billion, but that it was reduced by sequester to $18.6 billion.

The aggregate appropriation for 2013 (NIP plus MIP) was $71.9 billion, reduced by sequester to $67.6 billion. This is a decline of more than 10% from the 2012 aggregate figure of $75.4 billion.

According to ODNI intelligence budget documents obtained by the Washington Post, the FY2013 budget request of $52.6 billion for the National Intelligence Program was intended to be “a decrease of $1.3 billion, or 2.4 percent, below the FY 2012 enacted level.” But the actual NIP number for 2013, post-sequester, ended up being a decrease of $4.9 billion, or 9 percent, from the year before.

Intelligence community officials said that the abruptness and severity of the cuts complicated their efforts to manage an orderly drawdown of intelligence programs.

“Unlike more directly observable sequestration impacts, like shorter hours at public parks or longer security lines at airports, the degradation to intelligence will be insidious,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at a hearing last April. “It will be gradual, almost invisible, until, of course, we have an intelligence failure.”

“We recognize that in the current budgetary environment, the IC, along with the rest of the government, will have to endure some cuts,” said Robert S. Litt, General Counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at an American Bar Association conference yesterday.  “The problem with sequestration is that, rather than allowing us to make cuts in a sensible manner, based on mission needs, it requires us to cut everything across the board.”

“We were able to deal with sequestration in the past year by delaying or deferring some activities and reprogramming funds to cover critical gaps. But this fiscal year, sequestration will require another round of cuts, and we won’t have the same flexibility to deal with them.”

“Instead of short-term delays or creative mitigation strategies, we will be forced to cut capabilities. Instead of determining what capabilities we need to keep the country safe, we will be forced to determine what capabilities we can afford to provide. The impact of sequestration will likely open new intelligence gaps and prevent us from mitigating existing ones,” Mr. Litt said.

For decades, intelligence officials insisted that public disclosure of intelligence budget totals would cause intolerable damage to national security and that the total budget figures must therefore be classified. Eventually it was recognized that this was not true, and that it probably had never been true. If anything, unclassified budget numbers now serve the interests of intelligence by enabling officials to publicly advocate in defense of their budgets.

A new Department of Defense directive requires the Pentagon to notify Congress whenever a DoD official discloses classified intelligence to a reporter on an authorized basis, or declassifies the information specifically for release to the press.

The new directive on “Congressional Notification for Authorized Public Disclosure of Intelligence Information” applies to all components of the Department of Defense.

It was issued last week — despite the government shutdown — in response to a provision in the FY2013 Intelligence Authorization Act (section 504) that was passed by Congress last year as part of an effort to stem leaks of classified information.

The Senate Intelligence Committee explained then:  “This provision is intended to ensure that the intelligence committees are made aware of authorized disclosures of national intelligence or intelligence related to national security that are made to media personnel or likely to appear in the press, so that, among other things, these authorized disclosures may be distinguished from unauthorized ‘leaks’.”

Notification to Congress is required whenever the intelligence that is disclosed “is currently classified or if it is declassified for the purpose of the disclosure,” the directive states.  The reporting requirement does not apply to regular declassification activities, or to releases under the Freedom of Information Act or through litigation.

The new requirement casts a spotlight on the anomalous category of authorized disclosures of classified information, which would normally be considered a contradiction in terms.

Although there is an allowance for emergency disclosures of classified information in order to address an imminent threat (section 4.2b of executive order 13526), there is no recognized authority for non-emergency disclosures of classified intelligence to the press or to anyone who does not hold a security clearance and who has not signed a non-disclosure agreement. (Perhaps a lawyerly reading of the executive order would say that the prohibition against unauthorized disclosures of classified information to an uncleared person does not apply if the disclosure is authorized.)

In any case, official disclosures of classified information to the press — sometimes described as “authorized leaks” — are known to occur with some regularity.

What is unclear is what impact, if any, the new DoD directive will have on daily interactions with the press.  Will the Secretary of Defense actually file a report to Congress if he privately reveals a classified fact to a reporter?  That’s a little hard to imagine, though that’s what the law demands.  Or will the new reporting obligation instead serve to discourage authorized leaks to the press?

Because Congress imposed a one-year sunset on its new reporting requirement, the new DoD directive will expire on January 14, 2014, three months from now, unless it is renewed.  It will be interesting to see if even a single report of an authorized disclosure of classified intelligence is filed by then.

 

For more than half a century, the public has been able to access a wealth of information collected by U.S. intelligence from unclassified, open sources around the world.  At the end of this year, the Central Intelligence Agency will terminate that access.

The U.S. intelligence community’s Open Source Center (OSC), which is managed by the CIA, will cease to provide its information feed to the publicly accessible World News Connection as of December 31, 2013, according to an announcement from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), which operates the World News Connection (WNC).

The WNC “is an online news service, only accessible via the World Wide Web, that offers an extensive array of translated and English-language news and information,” an NTIS brochure explains. “Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources, WNC provides you with the power to identify what really is happening in a specific country or region. Compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media sources, the information in WNC covers significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events.”

“The information is obtained from full text and summaries of newspaper articles, conference proceedings, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals, and non-classified technical reports. New information is entered into WNC every government business day. Generally, new information is available within 48-72 hours from the time of original publication or broadcast.”

“For over 60 years, analysts from OSC’s domestic and overseas bureaus have monitored timely and pertinent open-source materials, including grey literature. Uniquely, WNC allows you to take advantage of the intelligence gathering experience of OSC,” the NTIS brochure says. Soon, that will no longer be true.

The WNC public feed from the Open Source Center is a highly attenuated version of what is available to official government users.  Within government, copyright considerations are ignored, but for public distribution they must be respected, and so (with some exceptions) only information products whose creators have signed a royalty agreement with NTIS are publicly released.

Even with that significant limitation and the attendant public subscription fees, the NTIS World News Connection has remained a highly prized resource for news reporters, foreign policy analysts, students and interested members of the public.

I check it almost every day.  Recently, for example, I have been following official statements from Russian officials who allege that the U.S. is covertly developing biological weapons for use against Russia in a military laboratory in the Republic of Georgia. The claim seems bizarre, but may nevertheless be politically significant.  Detailed English-language coverage of the matter, or of many other stories of regional interest and importance, is not readily available elsewhere.  (Moreso than in the past, however, portions of the material that is publicly accessible through WNC can be obtained elsewhere, through other news services or foreign websites.)

The reasons for the decision to terminate the World News Connection are a bit obscure.  Producing it is not a drain on U.S. intelligence– the marginal costs of providing the additional feed to NTIS are close to zero.  (The total budget for open source intelligence was about $384 million in FY2012, according to classified budget records obtained by the Washington Post from Edward Snowden.)  However, the program is a headache for NTIS to manage, particularly since NTIS officials had to negotiate numerous contracts with media source providers to offer their products to the public.  But the large majority of that work has already been accomplished, and now it will be rendered useless.

Mary Webster of the Open Source Center had initially proposed to cancel the public information feed as of September 30, according to an NTIS official.  Then she was persuaded to grant a six month reprieve.  But in the end, a cut-off date of December 31, 2013 was set.

If that comes to pass, it will be a blow to researchers and proponents of public intelligence. The Federation of American Scientists had previously argued that the U.S. government should actually expand public access to open source intelligence by publishing all unclassified, uncopyrighted Open Source Center products.  (“Open Up Open Source Intelligence,” Secrecy News, August 24, 2011.)  Instead, even the current range of publications will no longer be systematically released.  (Only a small fraction of publicly unreleased OSC records ever seem to leak.)

Although the Open Source Center is managed by the Central Intelligence Agency, it is formally a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  Yet the move the terminate public access to OSC products seemed to catch the ODNI unawares.

“Obviously our attention is on a possible lapse in appropriations, but we are looking into this,” said an ODNI spokesman on September 30, just before the government shutdown.

“The information provided through NTIS makes an irreplaceable contribution to U.S. national security,” wrote Prof. Gary G. Sick of Columbia University in an October 1999 letter, in response to a previous proposal to curtail coverage in the World News Connection.

The World News Connection “informs us about other countries in ways that otherwise would be nearly impossible,” Dr. Sick wrote. “It costs virtually nothing in comparison with almost any other national security system. It is not as sexy as a bomber or a missile, but its contributions to national security can be attested to by generations of policy-makers. I was in the White House during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, and my respect for the power of this information was born at that time. I often found it more helpful than the reams of classified material that came across my desk at the NSC.”

Criticism of U.S. intelligence takes many forms:  Intelligence agencies are too secretive, or they are too leaky.  They over-collect, or they under-perform.  Or all of these, and more besides.

Many of the criticisms can be reduced to a single argument: The U.S. intelligence community has become too large to be properly managed.

Interestingly, this is a view that is held by some within U.S. intelligence itself, according to a new dissertation by a CIA sociologist who studied and worked at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

“I actually fear that the IC is too big,” a CIA analyst at the NCTC told sociologist Bridget Nolan. “It’s crossed the point where it’s [producing] healthy competitive analysis. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re in each other’s way. We’re hindering the mission.”

“Something that’s worth considering,” another CIA analyst said, “is completely counterintuitive, which is to make the CT [counterterrorism] community smaller, not larger. I think there are far more people at CIA HQ now than when we defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. What the hell?”

As for the NCTC itself, yet another analyst said, “If it were to continue existing, it should be about one-tenth its current size.”

A reduction in the size of the intelligence community might be a sovereign remedy for many of the problems currently afflicting U.S. intelligence analysis, Dr. Nolan suggests.

“For the analysts, this would address the hindrances that come along with a bloated bureaucracy,” including an avalanche of superfluous communications. “It would also help with what they perceived to be excessive redundancy, as opposed to a lower level of redundancy which was deemed necessary for safety and accuracy reasons.”

(Though not discussed by Dr. Nolan, a similar case could be made that the security clearance system has become too big, and that its enormous size tends to magnify its intrinsic defects. There are always going to be flaws in quality control in background investigations, along with human error, and bad judgment calls. But when there are nearly five million cleared personnel, each of which needs to be reviewed and renewed every five to ten years, then those unavoidable flaws start to become serious problems. If the security cleared population were around one million instead of five million, then it would be far more manageable, more effective, and less expensive than it is.)

Dr. Nolan’s dissertation focuses on the sociology of information sharing at the NCTC, where she worked as a CIA analyst in 2010-11.  See “Information Sharing and Collaboration in the United States Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study of the National Counterterrorism Center” by Bridget Rose Nolan, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013.

A more prevalent view holds that not only is the U.S. intelligence community not “too big,” as Dr. Nolan’s interviewees asserted, it is not big enough. “The current inventory of intelligence personnel is insufficient to fill all the positions that the services (in the MIP) and ODNI (in the NIP) recognize as valid requirements,” according to a new report on “Workforce Planning in the Intelligence Community” from the RAND Corporation.

Nolan’s work gives voice to intelligence analysts who are overwhelmed by information, flustered by competitive pressures from their home agencies, and weighed down by dubious security policies.

“The daily life of a counterterrorism analyst tends to be chaotic and features a paradox between a deluge of complicated information on the one hand and a perceived lack of proper access to information on the other.”

In a manner reminiscent of Erving Goffman’s work on “interaction ritual,” Nolan provides fresh insight into the characteristic behaviors of intelligence analysts in their work environment.

For example, she reports that ordinary conversations between NCTC analysts often involve a kind of competitive one-upsmanship, “in which intelligence officers ‘out-correct’ and ‘out-logic’ each other in the course of routine conversation to the point where any increased accuracy in what has been said no longer seems meaningful.”

“It may take place when a listener interrupts a speaker to make the speaker’s sentence more precise. It can also happen when a listener demands a logical explanation for a routine action that would require no explanation outside the field of intelligence…. Many analysts routinely engage each other this way, such that it becomes difficult to say anything definitively without being challenged–often at the expense of the true purpose of the interaction.”

Dr. Nolan contends that the process of acculturation into a particular intelligence agency almost inevitably creates obstacles to interagency cooperation.  “The very qualities that make any individual intelligence agency strong are the same qualities that make information sharing and collaboration with other agencies difficult.”

“CIA creates loyalty by teaching its employees that they are the best and the brightest, and that their analytic and collection capabilities are second to none, but they do this in part by emphasizing the weaknesses of the other intelligence agencies…. Creating a strong in-group usually requires the designation of clear out-groups as well, often with accompanying negative sentiments and stereotypes, and these well-institutionalized notions cannot be overcome overnight.”

In particular, analysts say, CIA [which has its own Counterterrorism Center] disdains the National Counterterrorism Center and limits NCTC access to CIA information.  “Essentially, CIA purposefully puts NCTC at an analytic disadvantage, and then faults NCTC for it.”

“NCTC’s attempts to create a new culture” of information sharing, Nolan concluded, “are not enough to overcome the much stronger socialization processes at the home agencies.”

On the other hand, “the emergence of NCTC may have taken some (but not all) of the sting away from the notoriously frosty CIA-FBI relationship.”  According to one analyst interviewed by Nolan, “CIA and FBI have become closer because they have a mutual hatred for NCTC.”

(In my own limited experience as a visitor to NCTC, I found what seemed to be a competent group of analysts, including a notably high proportion of young women in positions of authority.  This demographic aspect of NCTC was not covered by Nolan’s study.)

Nolan discusses the role of jargon and secrecy in intelligence agency culture. This material is mostly familiar or unsurprising, though there is a striking account of the cut-throat use of secrecy by some analysts “to purposefully exclude [other] analysts from drafting or co-authoring a paper that would otherwise be theirs.”  In one case, “I was suddenly no longer able to even look at the paper that I’d written! She [a fellow analyst] compartmented me out of it and just went on ahead herself.”  As one analyst put it, “information sharing is when YOU give ME your data.”

Among other factors, “the ways in which analysts undermine each other have created a system in which self-interest is frequently at odds with group-interest, thereby impeding sharing and collaboration.”

Nolan devotes a chapter to the rarely-considered topic of humor in intelligence. Ordinarily, she says, “displays of emotion are discouraged, but laughter is the great exception to this rule.”

“Humor is such a big part of the sociology of the IC that any accurate portrayal of this workplace must include it…. At the end of the day, humor is everywhere in the Intelligence Community, from the lowliest analyst to the President’s top advisers.”

“Employees use humor to initiate neophytes into the fold, to acknowledge and reinforce status differences, to release the tension they feel from the overwhelming nature of their tasks, and to subvert the tiresome challenges coordination [of written reports] presents.”

In truth, few of the samples of intelligence humor presented here are very funny.  At a 2010 holiday party, analysts from the NCTC Al Qaeda and Sunni Extremism Group “took the Aerosmith line ‘Dude looks like a lady’ and rewrote it to say, ‘The suspect — whom we assess to be male — resembles a female.”

Overall, Nolan presents a frank account of life in an intelligence agency of a sort that is otherwise mostly unavailable to the public.  She identifies obstacles to the prescribed practice of information sharing, and presents a persuasive critique of the NCTC mission statement.  She proposes practical steps — beyond a possible reduction in the size of the IC — for improving performance as well as quality of life in the intelligence community.

True to form, the Central Intelligence Agency sought to block publication of Dr. Nolan’s dissertation, even though it did not contain classified information.  Among other concerns, CIA said that it “may not be understood by the public.”  So she resigned from the Agency, leaving her free to publish it.  See “Covering the undercovers” by Susan Snyder, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 20, 2013.

National Counterterrorism Center Policy Number 1 is entitled “Information Sharing Rules of the Road.” A copy is available here.

The 2013 annual report to Congress from the ODNI Information Sharing Environment discusses recent progress in information sharing and some remaining challenges.