By Cliff Montgomery – July 7th, 2010
The intelligence reform law which created a National Intelligence director and was to integrate and modernize America’s spy community has in many ways been a failure, according to the findings of a federal report quietly released last year.
The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act supposedly was created to “address institutional obstacles that had complicated the [Intelligence Community’s (IC)] struggle to adapt to new technologies and a changing national security environment,” according to the study put together by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) last year.
“The new act would redraw boundaries between foreign and domestic intelligence, set new rules for intelligence and law enforcement, enhance the interplay between civilian and military intelligence, correct the shortfall in information sharing, and meet the needs of traditional and emergent intelligence functions,” stated the DNI report.
But five years on, a large number of those original issues remain unchanged.
“Separating the…roles of the [DNI] on paper has been more easily implemented than delineating the day-to-day specifics of that division,” according to the report.
“The IC continues its struggle to keep up with technological innovations in collection,” the study declared.
“Other challenges include transforming analysis, anticipating future threats, increasing critical language capabilities, and improving hiring and security clearance processing.
“Congress…is still determining what constitutes success in intelligence reform and the oversight process,” the DNI report concluded.
One should remember that this is a DNI study, discussing the current success or failure of the legal actions which brought DNI into being. It’s probably reasonable to assume that the verdict of a less biased observer would be even more harsh.
If all this weren’t bad enough, the report’s handlers perhaps unwittingly reveal a continual weakness of the U.S. intelligence community: A shocking backwardness in data sharing and communications.
The digital “soft copy” of the DNI report–which is the version most members of the press and public would read–is a massive 18-Megabyte file, even though the short study contains only 25 pages of actual text.
Individuals with a fairly modern computer and a super-quick, broadband Internet access can download such a monster and actually read it–but almost no one else.
Perhaps that’s the point.
