The ODNI in the news

A report from the Inspector General relating to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) titled "Critical Intelligence Community Management Challenges" was recently release, amid some fanfare and lambasting.

According to the AFP, "US spy agencies are still hamstrung by the same turf battles and financial mismanagement that led to massive intelligence failures revealed by the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war, an internal report has found."

And the New York Times reports, "The report, by the inspector general, was the most detailed account to date of problems that bedevil America’s intelligence agencies more than four years after Congress and President George W. Bush created the director’s office to overcome weaknesses exposed by the Sept. 11 attacks."

Here's how some other people have summarized its contents:

Ongoing turf battles between intelligence agencies and a bloated bureaucracy point to key failings within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, says a report by its inspector general. And a survey found a majority of its employees “were unable to articulate a clear understanding” of its mission, roles and responsibilities," the IG says.

Chief deficiencies cited in report were "poor integration and barriers to information sharing," but there are other major findings in here related to financial management, acquisition oversight, etc.

The Director of National Intelligence has failed to exercise adequate leadership of the Intelligence Community (IC), which continues to suffer from poor integration, unjustified barriers to information sharing, and other defects, according to a remarkably critical November 2008 report of the Office of the DNI (ODNI) Inspector General that was released [recently].

The unclassified report, which is only 16 pages long, is available through the New York Times HERE, or through the Federation of American Scientists HERE, although I'm sure you can find it other places.

The report identifies the following as the most critical management challenges to the DNI:

1. Strengthening leadership and governance.
2. Accelerating progress in driving IC information sharing.
3. Removing impediments to IC collaboration and integration.
4. Improving financial management and acquisition oversight.
5. Resolving major legal issues.

Since I've been on a law kick recently (scroll through my shared items), and (most) everyone is encouraging me to prepare to go to law school, I was most interested by the fifth section pertaining to "major legal issues."

A paragraph from the document (emphasis mine):

Throughout our work we came across Intelligence Community leaders, operators, and analysts who claimed that they couldn’t do their jobs because of a “legal issue.” These “legal issues” arose in a variety of contexts, ranging from the Intelligence Community’s dealings with U.S. persons to the legality of certain covert actions. And although there are, of course, very real (and necessary) legal restrictions on the Intelligence Community, quite often the cited legal impediments ended up being either myths that overcautious lawyers had never debunked or policy choices swathed in pseudo-legal justifications. Needless to say such confusion about what the law actually requires can seriously hinder the Intelligence Community’s ability to be proactive and innovative.

First, the U.S. persons issue. Much ado was made about the PATRIOT Act, the FISA legislation, and the UK monitoring and storing social network traffic from sites like Facebook. Rightfully so, right? We don't like the idea of Big Brother, and we demand a right to privacy (even though it is not enumerated in the Constitution, but is instead a penumbra). I don't want to go any further with this U.S. persons thing right now; suffice it to say there are limits and/or restrictions as to what information can be collected and stored by government agencies on U.S. persons.

The second thing I found interesting about this paragraph was that, although legal restrictions exist, often the claim that legal reasons prevent analysts from doing their job are (institutional?) myths or pseudo-legal policy choices. I'm sure we've all run across these types of policy choices -- you know, where your organization's policy is that you do X, not because you (legally) have to, but because someone decided that it would be good policy, maybe out of a need to manage potential risk, and there is legal reasoning applied in abstract ways about why it's a good policy ... but it nevertheless falls under the category of a pseudo-legal policy choice. I was trying to think of some examples from previous jobs; if they're not too revealing I might post them here later as updates. Can you think of one?

[UPDATE: Being as vaguely descriptive as possible: Legal "requiring" you to put "disclaimers" on an email going out to a few individuals. The law does not require it; the email would not be illegal without it. But, just in case the email gets forwarded to a million people and your name is on it as the originator and the Federal commission that oversees this activity gets a complaint about the email and decides to investigate and decides to choose to apply a rule to an email that was distributed beyond the intent of the author, ... the organization's policy is to include the disclaimer.]

Last, I'm glad the writers of that paragraph realize that the IC needs to be proactive and innovative.

The report goes on to say, "U.S. persons rules are complicated, differ substantially between agencies, and pose significant impediments to analysts accessing intelligence possessed by other agencies."

Really? You mean to tell me this government rule or regulation is complicated and convoluted? Heaven forbid similar rules exist between different agencies performing the same task of collecting U.S. persons information... Out of the many things this report suggests should be fixed, this is one that I think is both troublesome and important. Troublesome because of the privacy issues; important because of the homeland security issues. And I'm not just talking terrorism here (although I'm sure that's a big part of it), but other homeland security issues like drug trafficking or human trafficking or other issues?
From CNET
From DNI



What do you think?


[update] DNI names new Inspector General, April 3, 2009. While this may look bad, the current DNI wasn't the subject of the November 2008 report. But still, kind of funny.