Top Secret America Analysis
Compare and contrast the Washington Post’s investigation of “Top Secret America” with our previous readings on the Intelligence Community. Do you feel “Top Secret America” accurately portrays the Intelligence community to the public? Do you have any concerns or disagreements with either the Post’s accounts or descriptions? Be sure your paper incorporates information and examples from the course readings.
After reading the Washington Post article I feel that the story has some merit but it is sensationalized. My first concern with the article is that it makes light of the work that is conducted by members of the Intelligence Community such as the following statement from the article.
“Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained
by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”
I don’t think that statement is accurate, there are a significant number of reports generated but I do not feel that these reports are routinely ignored. The authors of this article make a broad assessment of the Intelligence professionals that work diligently on these reports in order to protect the United States and monitor current and future threats. I do agree that their needs to be a refined process in place that highlights the most critical and time sensitive Intelligence Reports.
I do have a concern that there is an overabundance of Security measures such as Special Access Programs (SAP) which in essence creates closed agencies within agencies.
“Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.”
In closing I feel that the Intelligence Community is making forward progress in mitigating the redundancy that exists and incorporating systems that will aid analysts in identifying time sensitive information.
After reading the Washington Post article I feel that the story has some merit but it is sensationalized. My first concern with the article is that it makes light of the work that is conducted by members of the Intelligence Community such as the following statement from the article.
“Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained
by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”
I don’t think that statement is accurate, there are a significant number of reports generated but I do not feel that these reports are routinely ignored. The authors of this article make a broad assessment of the Intelligence professionals that work diligently on these reports in order to protect the United States and monitor current and future threats. I do agree that their needs to be a refined process in place that highlights the most critical and time sensitive Intelligence Reports.
I do have a concern that there is an overabundance of Security measures such as Special Access Programs (SAP) which in essence creates closed agencies within agencies.
“Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.”
In closing I feel that the Intelligence Community is making forward progress in mitigating the redundancy that exists and incorporating systems that will aid analysts in identifying time sensitive information.