The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it does not practice data mining in the narrow sense of searching databases to find anomalous patterns that could be indicative of terrorist activity. So the latest ODNI annual report to Congress (pdf) on data mining programs (the third such report) has little new information to offer.
Instead of data mining, narrowly defined, the ODNI and other intelligence agencies use “link analysis,” which involves searches that begin with a known or suspected terrorist or intelligence target and work backwards and forwards from there. But such “link analysis” is outside the strict definition of “data mining,” ODNI says, and so it is not discussed further in the new annual report.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.