The CIA is not your mom.

          This came to my attention when I heard an interview with William Arkin today, and it got me thinking about the relationship between the American press and operational security, and what a poor bastard the Director of National Intelligence is. Obviously we all remember Geraldo’s heroic blow for freedom of the press while embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in 2003, but foolishness aside, the intelligence and military authorities are in many ways placed in philosophical opposition to the press by the very nature of their professions. Adlai Stevenson told us that “the free press is the mother of all our liberties,” but in the eyes of some the interference of the press can represent a threat to the national security of the United States. This seems patently ridiculous to those with even a basic attachment to civil liberties, but it may be true in unexpected ways. The role of the press as the mother of all our liberties has perhaps created a fundamental misunderstanding in the mind of the American public as to the nature of intelligence organizations, and may be behind the introduction of organizational measures which fail to address the fundamental problems of the American intelligence community.
          The modern relationship between the intelligence community and the press stems from two periods in American history. The American press had existed for nearly a century before information gathering had become an issue. The historical experience of the press, both for American journalists and their British antecedents, as well as the political climate centered on limiting government excess in the new order, would play a role in shaping America’s attitude toward its clandestine services. At the same time, Washington and his confederates had operated a wide-ranging network of covert operatives during the Revolutionary War which had made a significant contribution to the eventual withdrawal of the British. This was clearly no small consideration for early American policy, as within two years of it being proposed in Washington’s first State of the Union address, the “secret services fund” had grown to comprise fully 10% of the federal budget.
          Intelligence gathering at this time was limited largely to intercepting and decoding battlefield communications, seizing and examining personal correspondence of enemy soldiers, and interrogating prisoners. The relatively short valuable life of this intelligence meant that the American public regarded it largely as an activity of war, and that the press had little interest in publishing the information gathered. The American Civil War did provide a glimpse of the future of this relationship, however, as news papers from the opposing side became a valuable intelligence source for both the Union and the Confederacy.
          The groundwork for the establishment of modern intelligence agencies had been laid with this prevailing view, lasting well into the 20th century, as America was obviously sufficiently competent at gathering intelligence to win the Second World War. The notion that there was a peacetime use for intelligence brought with it the McCarthy era’s view of intelligence gathering, which was that each failure of a significant event to occur was the fruit of the government’s increased vigilance. This was to lead, ultimately, to the American press shaping an entirely new view of the intelligence community toward the end of the Cold War.
          The press’s critical role in exposing the abuse of CIA authority both for unethical actions within their mandate, and illegal use of the organization on US soil, lead not only to congressional oversight of US intelligence agencies, but to an new current in the American attitude toward government information gathering practices. Whereas they had formerly played the role of omnicompetent protector which thwarted threats every day, the unfavorable press gave the American public a glimpse of the intelligence community as a dangerous group that lacked sufficient oversight.
          The events of September of 2001, however, proved that our child-like expectation that the intelligence community could and does know about and protect us from every threat hadn’t evaporated in a puff of government misconduct during the 1970s, as the fear of the other once again led us to believe that every day without an attack represented an active success on the part of a vigilant government. As time passed and word of misconduct on the part of American authorities began to spread, it also proved once again that the press is the sword and shield of the public against the tendency of government to abrogate rights in times of perceived crisis. While the protective nature of the press was once again established, a new outgrowth of our naïve, paternalistic attitude toward the intelligence community began to make itself felt; while we were faced with too stark a reality to believe that the government could protect us universally, the very public nature of this failure lead us to believe that the government should be able to protect us universally. In the ancient way of our people, we began to search for someone to blame.
          The Fourth Estate played its traditional role of protector of the republic, which should dismiss any questions about free reporting representing a threat to national security. Its role in the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence should cause us to wonder, however, what the press’s role is in politicizing the running of our national intelligence services has been.
          The Director of National Intelligence was the highly publicized position created to unify and direct America’s intelligence services, preventing the lapses in inter-departmental communication that investigations characterized as one of the primary domestic causes of the September 11th attacks. As numerous sources have been quick to point out, however, it is a position with little genuine power, and in that light it might cause the cynical to suggest that the position was created specifically to parade before the press, and to provide someone to fire instead of addressing fundamental problems.
          This is something of a harsh characterization, as the institution of the Director of National Intelligence is not necessarily doomed to failure. Redefining the position in order to maximize the actual utility of the concept, which is as a public face of our clandestine activities, could work to make the position wildly successful. As stated, however, the Director of National Intelligence is in the position of not only having to affect politically viable change, but of being responsible for fixing the fundamental issue that even when information is shared between departments, some facts are not recognizable as relevant without the benefit of hindsight. The very public discussion among the press and pundits may mean, however, that the President must use the position of DNI as it stands for reasons of politics, perhaps dooming at least the next person to hold the position.
          In this light, then, what would James Clapper, the presumed successor to the unfortunate Dennis Blair, require to make his tenure a success? The facile answer is “greater powers.” This is uninteresting, though. Casting about for concrete changes that General Clapper could put forward to both improve cooperation between intelligence services in a meaningful way, I was reminded of an interesting series of articles by John Robb, who looks suspiciously like Conan O’Brien.
          Briefly, Robb introduces us to the idea that insurgency has come to work on a principle of emergent behavior, which is that disparate or unaligned groups are capable of actions of a complexity far greater than that suggested by the sum of their parts. The basic principle is that successful techniques and strategies, and fundamentally information, propagate through unassociated groups though the openness of the forum in which insurgent attacks are conducted.
          The intelligence community has the advantage of being an aligned group of actors in this scenario, which is to say that even simple, open forum information sharing is made more effective by the common goals and motivations of the agencies in question. The problem, of course, is that creating this sort of open source intelligence (not to be confused with this use) development environment is that making this information widely available between legitimate parties also introduces necessary issues of security. The point, however, is not to solve the problems of the American intelligence community in a thousand words on the internet. The point is to suggest that the American press can be asking more germaine questions than “who is accountable?” when intelligence failures do occur.