Mac-Coleman

15 June 2013 –

If they can, they will. 

The U.S. intelligence community collects and stores vast amounts of data on the communications of millions of Americans.  This includes trillions of ordinary phone records, data transfers, and e-mails.  The intelligence community examines that data, gleans some actionable intelligence, and uses it to stop our enemies in Islamic fundamentalist terrorist networks.  On the one hand, this has helped to protect us.      

On the other hand, this practice destroys our individual freedoms.  How did this happen? It was a combination of bad executive decisions and cultural tendencies.  The president’s conceding of the tempo of the war to our Islamic fundamentalist enemies, the technology and methods used to collect, store, and analyze intelligence data, and the “can-do” culture of our intelligence community have created a domestic situation more dangerous to America’s freedoms than are the enemies it was created to defeat.    

Our problems start with our administration’s faulty decisions in the war against Islamic fundamentalism.  No matter what we want to admit, these enemies are at war against us.  Some say that this war has been ongoing for the last thirteen hundred years.  But, today’s Islamic movements don’t have to defeat western sovereign nations’ forces on a traditional field of battle; they have only to garner enough influence in the Moslem community to eliminate western-leaning governments in the Middle East.  They will then be able to create a large enough power base to successfully challenge U.S. influence everywhere.  President Obama’s recent declaration that the war with Islamic terrorists is over is wrong and strengthens our enemies’ position.  The president has conceded the war’s tempo—the timing and the targets for attack—to fundamentalists whose message resonates in the Moslem community that supports it.    

The war is not over.  But, acting as if it is puts the primary responsibility to defend us on our intelligence community and not on our military forces.  The intelligence community must now predict the targets and the timing of all enemy attacks, instead of support offensive military forces to root out and kill the enemy.  This puts pressure on the intelligence community to collect increasing amounts of data, collate it, analyze it, and then pinpoint suicide-bombers, et al, before they attack American targets.  This defensive focus has created a blueprint for intelligence collection abuse.   

It is not surprising that few intelligence community leaders resist their role in the war.  Three decades in the intelligence business revealed certain truths about the community.  If they can collect intelligence, they will want to.  If they want to collect intelligence, they will create enabling policies to do so.  Finally, information will never be destroyed. 

Today, the intelligence community collects, stores, and retrieves levels of information that thirty years ago were simply unattainable.  In 2013, it manipulates electronically generated data at a rate that is thousands of times higher than its best capabilities in 1983.  The U.S. intelligence community can do its collection and analysis job better now than at any time in history.

Because the intelligence community leaders can produce actionable intelligence based on such vast amounts data, they naturally want to do it.  That is the reason they go to work.  Therefore, it is difficult for intelligence community leaders not to embrace the current, wrongly-focused fight.  They are seduced by the importance of their expanded role to a point where they are willing to delve into and collect data on Americans’ daily lives.  They can do it.  They want to do it.  They do it.

Finally, nothing the intelligence community collects is ever destroyed.  The culture has learned that if the information does not apply today, it will apply later.  Past collectors and analysts filled warehouses with such information.   Today, they can carry the Library of Congress in a briefcase.  Imagine what the National Security Agency will be able to store, retrieve, and analyze when it finishes its multi-million-square-foot facility in Alpine, Utah.  This culture is capturing and storing our Fourth Amendment Rights.  Never put something in an e-mail or text that you don’t want the whole world—or NSA—to see. 

In sum, the administration has conceded to the enemy the war’s tempo and timing.  To overcome the effects of this bad decision, the intelligence community, with alacrity, collects information on Americans.  Its then does what it does best and collects ever more data.  Naturally, it will maintain that data, to be used for whatever the administration deems essential. 

Nothing is more corrupt than this situation, and, it won’t even help much to win the war.