From a Whisper to a Shout: 

The IC Should Use Its Outside Voice

Debora Pfaff and Bowman Miller

National security is the U.S. Government’s most basic responsibility, 

laid out in the first sentence of the Constitution’s preamble: provide 

for the common defense. But what was once the exclusive domain of 

the public sector now depends on a range of actors, individuals, 

corporations, and entities who—unlike government—are not beholden

to the public interest. Their voices are noisy, voluminous, and—because 

they know little about how the government protects them and even less 

about the role of the Intelligence Community in national security—

often ill-informed. Their increased willingness to challenge government 

authorities means that, unless the IC finds its voice within this rising 

cacophony, its silence will facilitate its demise and, along with it, the

safety and security of the nation it is sworn to protect and defend.

RESEARCH SHORT

CATALYST Designed to spark positive conversations 

on the future of the IC 

June 23, 2021

What this is:

This report is the product 

of academic research. As the 

IC’s university, NIU is uniquely 

positioned to use academic 

approaches to research—and 

report on—subjects of interest 

to the community.

What this is not:

This is not finished intelligence. 

The opinions expressed in this 

report are solely the author’s 

and not those of the National 

Intelligence University or 

any other U.S. Government 

agency.

IMAGE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK
2

For more than two centuries, the defense of the nation has depended on its ability to command 

physical domains—air, land, sea, and, most recently, space. Securing these domains involved 

a relatively straightforward identification of adversaries, followed by an evaluation of their 

intent and capabilities. Although surprises did occur, they were mostly within the realm of 

identified plausibility.

This, quite simply, is no longer the case. A fifth domain—cyberspace—has democratized the 

array of potential actors and threats. A mere two decades into its existence, the nation is now 

uncertain who may be in a position to cause it harm, whether they intend to be adversarial in 

the first place, and how their actions in the virtual domain will impact the four physical domains. 

The tremendous increase in the type and number of actors able to participate in—and control—

the cyberspace domain means power can shift from the relatively large institution of 

government to a single individual. 

Consider a few examples. Twitter censored then-President Trump after the January 6, 2021, 

attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing concerns about “the risk of further incitement of violence.”1

Critics have decried Twitter’s ban as coming from a private entity wielding disproportionate 

power to quash free speech, while supporters argue Twitter is its own company, free to set its 

own rules. Elsewhere, Australia has demanded that tech giants like Facebook pay for the 

nation’s news, and in response Facebook banned all Australian news on its site.2 The hacktivist 

group Anonymous—deemed freedom fighters delivering extrajudicial justice by those who 

like them and cyber-terrorists by those who do not—has conducted numerous cyberattacks 

against government institutions and private corporations across the world. Finally, a decade 

ago an ordinary Tunisian street vendor, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, sparked the 2010 

Arab Spring with a singular act of self-immolation that galvanized the Arab world through 

social media. 

In all these examples, an individual or private entity undertook actions that temporarily or 

permanently shifted the balance of power away from a government. That government’s ability 

to regain and retain its eroded power largely depends on its credibility, but earning credibility 

is no longer as simple as publicizing fact-based information supported by scientific inquiry to 

arrive at genuine knowledge. Attention has become a resource, and the right to silence a 

luxury. 3 The twin disruptors of misinformation and disinformation have produced an 

environment in which an explosion of information—with 

varying degrees of accuracy—saps the public of the energy to 

separate what it needs to know from what someone wants it to 

know. Everyone operates in a new reality informed by a 24-hour 

news cycle, disproportionately powerful social media, and an 

excess of information with a low signal-to-noise ratio. 

Increasingly, choosing what to pay attention to also means choosing what to believe. As 

people’s brains struggle with information overload, they try to make sense of competing data 

streams, and in their evaluation, they tend to trust information that fits into their preexisting 

worldview, which reinforces hardened beliefs. 4 This is especially troubling for national 

Democracy and democratically 

accountable institutions like the 

IC’s 18 members require the public 

to have knowledge, not just faith.
3

security because most of what the public hears and believes about national intelligence comes 

from information sources outside the Community. The IC’s voice has not gotten lost in the 

noise—it was never there in the first place. 

Eschewing Public Discourse . . .

From its very beginning, the IC was modeled on and grounded in secrecy. It was forced to 

mature rapidly as a mechanism to deal with the Soviet Union and quickly evolved into a closed 

system that required secret collection methods to obtain information on the enemies of the 

United States.

5 Well before the National Security Act of 1947 officially created the basis for 

the Community we know today, America’s leaders had embraced the value of espionage—of 

secrecy as the basis for intelligence success.6 They were not alone: Austria, Britain, France,

Germany, Italy, and Russia all established permanent intelligence functions before the United 

States,7 and all were steeped in “collect[ing] and classify[ing] all possible information relating 

to the strength, organization etc. of foreign armies. . . .”8

This posture permeated every part of the IC’s culture until secrecy became what we do, as well 

as how we do it. As a rule, the IC evinces a strong preference for classified over open-source

information, at times to the detriment of accuracy and information sharing.9, 10, 11 Examples of 

this emphasis on secrecy abound, at costs well beyond financial considerations. CIA’s

Directorate of Operations has a staff and a budget at least three times larger than that of its

Directorate for Analysis.12 The costs of security classification more than doubled from $8.65 

billion in 2007 to $18.39 billion in 2017, the last year the Information Security Oversight Office 

has reported such figures.13

In our eagerness to ensure information does not slip into the wrong hands, we have forgotten 

that the hand that feeds us belongs to the American public. They are the greatest consumer of 

the public good that is national security. Democracy and democratically accountable 

institutions like the IC’s 18 members require the public to have knowledge, not just faith.

The IC has made cursory attempts at transparency: creating the Intel.gov website; publishing

the Principles of Transparency for the Intelligence Community; and launching a handful of 

Twitter sites and forward-facing agency webpages. However, these efforts have been reactive, 

not proactive—always in response to an accusation of wrongdoing. They are meant to mollify

and slake the public curiosity, rather than to engage and assimilate. The unwillingness to even

consider a comprehensive, IC-wide strategy for engaging the public has put the IC back on its 

heels, forced to defend its position to a skeptical public without offering evidence and without 

the benefit of an established brand and a proven track record. 

Data on the IC is restricted for nearly all of the American public, which must then turn to available 

sources of information to make sense out of the basic need that is national security. We let others 

speak for us. Journalists, Congress, political elites, and the entertainment industry form too much 

of the public's perception of the IC. And each of these entities has its own motivated reasoning 

for communicating certain information in a particular way, which does not always line up with 
4

the Community's intent and interests. The voices outside of the IC carry, while ours remain 

behind SCIF doors, firewalls, and steel fences. In the absence of evidence, the impressionable 

human mind fills in the blanks, using motivated reasoning to believe what it wants to believe.14

Because the IC cannot talk about our wins, our losses appear to be mounting. 

We do not speak because we are terrified that we will say something we should not or will 

reveal too much . . . or even prove to be wrong. This fear of risk has pervaded the IC since the 

threat-based approach to national security emerged after WWII. The irony of our efforts to 

avoid public attention by eschewing public discourse is that the IC is now on a collision course 

with exactly what we want to avoid. We have target fixation. The IC has a strategy for 

everything but how to engage our most important customer—the American people—and that

is going to end with an explosion we are ill-equipped to handle. 

. . . Proves Problematic in a Changing World

It is unlikely that a single event will provoke a consequential failure of public confidence in the 

IC; rather, it is and will continue to be a slow erosion. Recent polling by the Chicago Council on 

Global Affairs indicates that a majority of Americans believe the IC is effective and necessary.15

But 78 percent of the Silent Generation approves of the IC, compared with just 47 percent of 

Millennials. And an already growing perception exists among half of Americans that intelligence 

agencies sacrifice civil liberties in pursuit of their mission.16 The proliferation of entertainment 

industry depictions, which purport that the NSA records every American’s phone calls and that 

everyone who works for the CIA is another James Bond or Carrie Mathison, will continue to 

mislead, mystify, and misinform. Without authoritative information directly from a trusted IC, 

Americans will continue to form opinions based on fiction and hyperbole.

The Intelligence Community, like most federal entities, depends on contractors. To serve their 

government clients, contractors develop the same—or perhaps even better—capabilities. Thus 

far, the prohibition against contractors serving in inherently governmental roles has prevented 

a formal shadow IC from forming around these private entities. Contractors cannot undertake 

any function that is “so intimately related to the public interest as to require performance by 

federal government employees.”17 During a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental 

Affairs Committee Hearing on the Intelligence Community Contractor Workforce, Principal 

Deputy Director for National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan stated that those functions 

include “decisions on priorities, strategic direction or commitment of resources.”18

The IC hasrelied on this policy to preserve the provision of decision advantage to policymakers 

as an inherently governmental function. What cannot be controlled is where the attention of 

the policymaker will be directed. In fact, non-intelligence sources have already begun 

competing for the attention of the policymaker—often with success. A RAND Corporation 

study found that policymakers valued accuracy and timeliness above all else and were often 

disappointed by how long it took to receive intelligence from the IC on pressing matters.

19

Policymakers turn to the most available sources, including television, advisors, print 
5

journalism, and the Internet to glean information with which to make a decision paramount to 

national security. These voices are not beholden to the public interest, and their motivations 

include influencing U.S. policy and activity.

If there are lingering doubts as to whether private industry could appropriate a mission of the 

U.S. Government, the April 23 launch of SpaceX is a ready reminder that it is already 

happening. In 2006, NASA invested in the then four-year-old company in the hope it could 

provide cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station (ISS) to reduce 

NASA’s need to purchase seats on Russian flights. Since its first flight to the ISS in 2020,

SpaceX has grown into a $2 billion corporation with 1,000 satellites in orbit and designs on 

populating Mars. This has not gone unnoticed by NASA and has sparked a debate about 

SpaceX’s divided attention between its own ambitions and its NASA obligations.

20

It Is Time To Speak Up

Intelligence specialist and scholar Amy Zegart suggests the IC has shown that its programs are 

legal but has not shown that they are valuable.21 And what the American public does not see 

while streaming episodes of Alias and reading 

WikiLeaks is that the Intelligence Community 

provides the one thing the private sector seldom can: 

all-source objectivity. 

Does this mean opening up our doors to the world and 

discussing every aspect of our business? Absolutely 

not. Democracy and security have a tenuous balance. 

Democracy demands free and open public dialogue 

about the decisions those elected or appointed are 

making on behalf of the governed. Security demands 

just the right measure of discretion to allow the public 

to provide informed input about the strategic 

direction of the country, and how its leaders are

keeping it safe. 

Both exposure and secrecy are essential to a truly 

free society. But we must achieve a new theory 

of secrecy appropriate to our new society of 

instant communication, universal education, and 

mass opinion . . . in most cases, ‘need to know’ 

would also provide the basis for sharp delineation 

between the politically significant information 

needed for public decision making, and the 

technical detail not essential to such decisions. 

Dr. Pfaff and Dr. Miller co-direct NIU’s Center for 

Truth, Trust, and Transparency (Tr3), which 

explores the IC’s complex, changing relationship 

with the public. The public has relied on the IC for 

national security but knows very little about how it 

comes to enjoy that public good. Citizens are now 

an integral part of the national security mission, and 

we in the IC have a responsibility to bring them into 

the fold. This does not mean sacrificing security for 

transparency . . . but it does mean having some 

conversations long considered culturally taboo in 

the IC. Is the Intelligence Community still most 

effective operating within its current level of 

secrecy? We do not really know because we are too 

afraid to ask. And that is exactly why the IC should 

meaningfully reexamine and assess how it can best 

be available to the U.S. public while keeping the 

nation’s adversaries at bay. NIU’s Tr3 Center aims 

to pose and research these kinds of questions and 

to explore options for expanding the scope of IC 

interaction with the public that it serves to defend 

and also increasingly to inform. 
6

The latter generally constitutes the data which would be of value to our nation's 

adversaries.22

William Colby wrote these words in 1976. Thus, the need for increased engagement with the 

public is hardly new. It has simply been ignored because . . . well, ignoring it was possible. We 

cannot do that any longer. As others’ voices rise to add to the global cacophony, we in the IC 

must embrace our own conversations within our own walls, conversations that ask questions 

about building a strategy to engage the public, transparency efforts, our blended commitment 

to security, a credible voice, and true value to the common defense.

If these conversations do not take place—earnestly, expansively, and soon—the growing 

privatization of the intelligence function becomes a very real risk. With the seeds already sown, 

private intelligence companies eventually will compete for policymaker attention, eager to fill 

in gaps and meet consumer requirements for timeliness, speed, and even accuracy. As trust in 

their methods and findings grows, the centrality of the official, government IC will diminish.

So, we must assume the risk of challenging the IC’s beloved raison d’être, tune out the 

guardians of the status quo, and come to terms with the information-hungry world we have, 

not the one we might want. 

The IC must stop whispering and be heard. 

Dr. Deb Pfaff is an Associate Professor of Research with the Ann Caracristi Institute at National 

Intelligence University. She has 20 years of government service, 17 with the IC. Prior to her time with 

NIU, she served in the analyst career field at DIA. She holds a Doctorate in justice, law, and criminology 

from American University, and a master’s degree in forensic science from The George Washington 

University.

Dr. Bo Miller is a Professor of Transnational Issues at the National Intelligence University where he has 

taught since 2005. His more than 50 years in intelligence have spanned Air Force counterintelligence, 

Department of State all-source intelligence analysis, research, and teaching. He is a retired Senior 

Executive with 18 years as Director of Analysis for Europe in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and 

Research, and his research and publications focus on Europe, terrorism, and IC challenges.

If you have comments, questions, or a suggestion for a Research Short topic or article, please contact 

the NIU Office of Research at NIU_OOR@dodiis.mil.
7

Endnotes

1 “Permanent Suspension of @RealDonaldTrump,” Twitter (blog), Twitter, Inc, January 8, 2021, 

blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html. 

2 Elizabeth Dwoskin and Gerrit De Vynck, “Facebook's Brazen Attempt to Crush Regulations in Australia May 

Backfire,” Washington Post, February 19, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/18/facebookaustralia-news-publishers-regulations/. 

3 Matthew B Crawford, World Beyond Your Head: on Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: 

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). 

4 Janna Anderson and Lee Rainey, “The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online,” Pew Research Center, October 

19, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/10/19/the-future-of-truth-and-misinformation-online/.

5 Josh Kerbel, “The U.S. Intelligence Community's Kodak Moment,” The National Interest, May 14, 2014, 

nationalinterest.org/feature/the-us-intelligence-communitys-kodak-moment-10463. 

6 “From George Washington to Colonel Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, 

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-10-02-0415. [Original source: The Papers of George 

Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 10, 11 June 1777 – 18 August 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. 

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 425–26].

7 Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

8 Thomas G. Fergusson, British Military Intelligence, 1870-1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence 

Organization (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1984), 45. 

9 Roderick M. Kramer, “A Failure to Communicate: 9/11 and the Tragedy of the Informational Commons,” 

International Public Management Journal 8, no. 3 (2005): 397-416, https://doi.org/10.1080/10967490500439867.

10 James M. Davitch, “Open Sources for the Information Age: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 

Unclassified Data,” Joint Forces Quarterly 87 (2017): 18–25.

11 Cortney Weinbaum, “The Intelligence Community’s Deadly Bias Toward Classified Sources,” Defense One, April 

9, 2021. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/04/intelligence-communitys-deadly-bias-toward-classifiedsources/173255/.

12 Gregory F. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2008), 146. 

13 “Information Security Oversight Office, 2017 Report to the President,” National Archives Records Administration,

https://www.archives.gov/files/isoo/reports/2017-annual-report.pdf.

14 Kirsten Weir, “Why We Believe Alternative Facts: How Motivation, Identity and Ideology Combine To

Undermine Human Judgment,” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, May 2017, 

www.apa.org/monitor/2017/05/alternative-facts.

15 Stephen Slick et al., “Annual Polling Confirms Sustained Public Confidence in U.S. Intelligence,” Lawfare (blog), 

July 10, 2019, www.lawfareblog.com/annual-polling-confirms-sustained-public-confidence-us-intelligence.

16 Stephen Slick and Joshua Busby, “2019 Public Attitudes on US Intelligence,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs,

September 4, 2020, www.thechicagocouncil.org/research/public-opinion-survey/2019-public-attitudes-usintelligence.

17 Section 5 of Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998, PL 105-270, codified at 31 USC 501 (1998). 

18 Elaine Halchin, “The Intelligence Community and Its Use of Contractors: Congressional Oversight Issues,” U.S. 

Congressional Research Service R44157, August 18, 2015. 

19 Lorna Teitelbaum, “The Impact of the Information Revolution on Policymakers’ Use of Intelligence Analysis” 

(PhD diss., Pardee RAND Graduate School, 2005), 205.

20 Kenneth Chang, “After Sparring, NASA and SpaceX Declare a Shared Mission,” New York Times, October 10, 

2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/science/nasa-spacex-elon-musk.html. 

21 Amy Zegart, “Real Spies, Fake Spies, NSA, and More: What My 2012 and 2013 National Polls Reveal,” Lawfare

(blog), October 2019, www.lawfareblog.com/real-spies-fake-spies-nsa-and-more-what-my-2012-and-2013-

national-polls-reveal.

22 William E. Colby, “Intelligence Secrecy and Security in a Free Society,” International Security 1, no. 2 (1976): 

3-14, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538496.