The author reveals the dangerous weaknesses undermining domestic intelligence in the United States and tells why a new national security service should not be part of the FBI. He explains the need for a new domestic intelligence agency, modeled on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and lodged in the Department of Homeland Security.

A new solution for reforming U.S. domestic intelligence

Domestic intelligence in the United States today is undermanned, uncoordinated, technologically challenged, and dominated by an agency—the FBI—that is structurally unsuited to play the central role in national security intelligence. Despite the importance of domestic intelligence to national security, it is the weakest link in the U.S. intelligence system.

In Remaking Domestic Intelligence, Richard A. Posner explains the dangerous weaknesses undermining our domestic intelligence and offers a solution: the creation of a domestic intelligence agency that would be separate from the FBI and have no law enforcement authority or responsibility.

He shows why the FBI, because its primary activity is law enforcement, is not the solution to the problem of domestic intelligence and how a new agency, lodged in the Department of Homeland Security, would, lacking a law enforcement function, avoid the deep tension between criminal investigation and national security intelligence that plagues the FBI—and might even allay concerns that domestic intelligence endangers civil liberties.

Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and the author of Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005).

Visit Remaking Domestic Intelligence Download Page

Full-text PDF versions of each chapter can be accessed below by clicking on the desired chapter title.

Paperback: 95 pages
Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press; 1 edition (September 16, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0817946829
ISBN-13: 978-0817946821

Prefatory Note
The magnitude of the terrorist threat to the United States, coupled with the lack of coordination among our domestic intelligence agencies and the continuing failure of the lead agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to develop an adequate domestic intelligence capability, argues compellingly for reform.

This monograph by Richard A. Posner, a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and the author of Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), develops the case for reform and makes concrete proposals.

Because the FBI’s failure is systemic, being rooted in the incompatibility of criminal law enforcement (the FBI’s principal mission) with national security intelligence, the reform must have a structural dimension. Under pressure from the White House, the FBI has now reluctantly agreed to create a unit to be called the “National Security Service,” by fusing the Bureau’s three divisions that at present share intelligence responsibility. ...

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment