Bits, Bytes, and Balance Sheets

The 9/11 attacks represented a catastrophic failure of domestic intelligence, and the danger of terrorist attacks on United States soil has not abated despite widespread efforts to improve homeland security. A terrorist can still enter the United States with relative ease, either with forged documents or by being smuggled across the Canadian or Mexican borders. And homegrown terrorists—those with no personal, familial, ethnic, or political ties to a foreign country—pose a major potential threat in an era of weapons of mass destruction. Reorganizing the FBI is not the answer, given the deep ongoing tension between criminal investigation and national security intelligence. A separate, true domestic intelligence agency, says Richard Posner, should be created and lodged in the Department of Homeland Security. In this Hoover Classics edition of Remaking Domestic Intelligence, Posner shows why an agency modeled after England’s MI5 or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is urgently needed in the United States.

Intelligence fits better into an agency concerned with preventing attacks, the author explains, than into one concerned with prosecuting the attackers. He points out the many disadvantages of the “criminal law enforcement” approach to terrorism—such as the tendency to evaluate intelligence data from the limited perspective of building a criminal case—and makes the convincing argument that an agency 100 percent dedicated to domestic intelligence would do better at it than the FBI which, largely dominated by criminal investigators, is made up at most of 20 percent of its agents devoted to intelligence. Posner outlines the advantages of housing the new agency in the Department of Homeland Security—including the easing of civil liberties concerns by its separation from the J. Edgar Hoover legacy, its ability to more easily coordinate vast information resources, and more.

In his new foreword to this Hoover Classic, the author now expresses some concern about placing this new agency within Homeland Security. If the DHS does not “get its act together,” he says, then a domestic intelligence service should be a free-standing agency. But in either case, his underlying argument remains the same: we need to restructure our national security system, and we need to do it now.