Remaking Domestic Intelligence (HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION)
A new solution for reforming U.S. domestic intelligenceDomestic 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).