"By its very nature, domestic and homeland security intelligence - TopicsExpress

"By its very nature, domestic and homeland security intelligence is intrusive and risks infringing on civil liberties. As then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff put it: Intelligence, as you know, is not only about spies and satellites. Intelligence is about the thousands and thousands of routine, everyday observations and activities. Surveillances, interactions – each of which may be taken in isolation as not a particularly meaningful piece of information, but when fused together, gives us a sense of the patterns and the flow that really is at the core of what intelligence analysis is really about.41 These thousands and thousands of observations are largely observations about people and events in America, and in the years since 9/11 America has created a domestic intelligence system to collect them. In some cases the people are terrorists or other types of criminals, and the intelligence collected has helped to prevent bad events from happening. But in many cases these observations, this intelligence, is about routine activities undertaken by ordinary Americans and others who do not intend to cause harm. Unless the threat situation changes dramatically, we are not likely to see a new American domestic intelligence agency anytime soon. In the place of an “American MI-5,” however, a huge and expensive domestic intelligence system has been constructed. This system has thus far succeeded in keeping America safer than most experts would have predicted ten years ago, but it has also reduced civil liberties in ways that many Americans fail to understand. Precisely because it was unplanned and is decentralized, this domestic intelligence system has not received the oversight it deserves. In the long run, American liberty as well as security will gain from a fuller discussion of the benefits and risks of homeland security intelligence." Domestic Intelligence Today: More Security but Less Liberty? Erik Dahl The Journal of the Naval Post Graduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security (The quoted message below is from the same source.)