Secret intelligence agencies and congress

Society ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Howe Ransom
Author(s):  
Mark M. Lowenthal

This article focuses on the policymaker and intelligence analyst relationship which is central to intelligence. The article proceeds from three main points: the centrality of analyst relationship with the consumer; the notion that intelligence's meaningful function is to serve as a larger apparatus for policymakers; and the strict boundary between policymakers and intelligence officers where intelligence officers are expected to distance themselves from creating preferences and recommendations. In the policymaker-intelligence relationship, the relationship should be dominated by the policymakers who have contested and won an election. Policymakers have the right to govern, set budgets, make decisions, and order operations. Second, intelligence is a service provided to policymakers. Although intelligence is an important and useful part of the policy process, its role should be determined by the policymakers and not by the intelligence agencies.


Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
Karen L. Remmer

In recent years no country in Latin America has played a more important role in raising questions about the goals and instruments of U.S. foreign policy than Chile. The revelations of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government opened the door to far-reaching criticisms of the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies and helped generate the Carter administration's human rights policy. Today this policy is facing one of its sternest tests in Chile.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vian Bakir

The Snowden leaks indicate the extent, nature, and means of contemporary mass digital surveillance of citizens by their intelligence agencies and the role of public oversight mechanisms in holding intelligence agencies to account. As such, they form a rich case study on the interactions of “veillance” (mutual watching) involving citizens, journalists, intelligence agencies and corporations. While Surveillance Studies, Intelligence Studies and Journalism Studies have little to say on surveillance of citizens’ data by intelligence agencies (and complicit surveillant corporations), they offer insights into the role of citizens and the press in holding power, and specifically the political-intelligence elite, to account. Attention to such public oversight mechanisms facilitates critical interrogation of issues of surveillant power, resistance and intelligence accountability. It directs attention to the <em>veillant panoptic assemblage</em> (an arrangement of profoundly unequal mutual watching, where citizens’ watching of self and others is, through corporate channels of data flow, fed back into state surveillance of citizens). Finally, it enables evaluation of post-Snowden steps taken towards achieving an <em>equiveillant panoptic assemblage</em> (where, alongside state and corporate surveillance of citizens, the intelligence-power elite, to ensure its accountability, faces robust scrutiny and action from wider civil society).


Author(s):  
Steven D. Levitt

Abstract The fight against terrorism requires identifying potential terrorists before they have the opportunity to act. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which retail banking data – which as far as we know are not currently used by anti-terror intelligence agencies in any systematic manner – are a useful tool in identifying terrorists. Using detailed administrative records of a large British bank, we demonstrate that a number of variables in the data are strongly correlated with terrorism-related activities. Having both an Islamic given name and surname, not surprisingly, are among the strongest of these predictors, but a wide range of other demographic characteristics and behaviors observed in the data are also correlated strongly with terrorist involvement. The real key to our method, however, rests on the identification of one particular pattern of banking behavior (what we call “Variable Z”) which dramatically improves our ability to identify terrorists. Our model is demonstrated to have substantial power to identify terrorists both within sample and out of sample.


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