Government Executive - Authors - Shane Harris

Luddites Can Still Be Good Managers

Shane Harris — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has a confession to make: She doesn’t use email. In fact, she says she doesn’t have any personal online accounts. “Some would call me a Luddite, [but it’s] my own personal choice,” Napolitano explains.

No doubt there are times when many of us also would like to go off the grid. And yet Napolitano’s revelation, which she made during an interview with me at a Government Executive cybersecurity conference in September, sparked some bewildered reactions among journalists and technology experts. That’s because Napolitano is the top government official in charge of protecting civilian agencies’ cyber networks from hackers and spies. You’d think someone with that job would be plugged in to the infrastructure she’s trying to defend. Nope.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised -- or even worried. When it comes to running a Cabinet department, expertise is overrated. The qualities that matter most are more ephemeral, hard to learn and harder still to master: leadership, management acumen, the ability to govern. These are the predictors of management success; technical fluency is not.

Consider some recent examples. Leon Panetta knew little about covert intelligence when he became CIA director in 2009. As President Clinton’s chief of staff, Panetta read intelligence reports and sat in on the president’s national security briefings, but he was by no means schooled in the tradecraft of espionage.

Yet Panetta succeeded as director largely by being a superb manager. At a time when the CIA was under fire from Congress over interrogation and covert counterterrorism programs, he seemed instinctively to know that the best way to lead his agency was to defend it politically. And in politics, Panetta was expert, one of the shrewdest tacticians in Washington. He also worked closely with the Pentagon on global counterterrorism operations rather than try to outmaneuver the military. You could argue that Panetta recognized he was outgunned, but that’s also the sign of a good manager -- knowing when to cooperate and not to fight.

Similarly, nothing in Robert Gates’ career obviously qualified him to run the Pentagon in wartime. Gates was an intelligence officer, the first career CIA employee to rise to the director position, in 1991. But he excelled as a Defense secretary -- under two presidents -- because he is a stalwart manager with a superbly tuned political ear. Gates was recruited by the George W. Bush administration to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but turned down the job because he knew it didn’t have the bureaucratic muscle and political clout of the CIA or Defense Department.

Like Panetta, Gates took over an organization in crisis. Despite his 13-year absence, Gates and his team were heralded by intelligence and military veterans as the “return of the grown-ups.” It didn’t matter that Gates was a career spy and not a soldier. He knew a lot about running organizations whose credibility was strained. When he led the CIA, the agency was being faulted for not predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Defense secretary, Gates was praised for his steadfastness, calm and resolve in the face of turmoil. The rare bipartisan support he enjoyed on Capitol Hill was a big reason President Obama asked Gates to stay on in his administration, the only Bush Cabinet official to make that transition.

Expertise is no guarantee of success. It might even be an obstacle. Maybe Napolitano’s Luddite ways will turn out to have served her well.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, and was a staff writer for Government Executive.

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When Ignorance is Bliss

Shane Harris — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

But we shouldn’t be too surprised—or even worried. When it comes to running a Cabinet department, expertise is overrated. The qualities that matter most are more ephemeral, hard to learn and harder still to master: leadership, management acumen, the ability to govern. These are the predictors of management success; technical fluency is not.

Similarly, nothing in Robert Gates’ career obviously qualified him to run the Pentagon in wartime. Gates was an intelligence officer, the first career CIA employee to rise to the director position, in 1991. But he excelled as a Defense secretary—under two presidents—because he is a stalwart manager with a superbly tuned political ear. Gates was recruited by the George W. Bush administration to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but turned down the job because he knew it didn’t have the bureaucratic muscle and political clout of the CIA or Defense Department.

Expertise is no guarantee of success. It might even be an obstacle. Maybe Napolitano’s Luddite ways will turn out to have served her well.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, and was a staff writer for Government Executive.

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The Next Four Years

Shane Harris — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 01:00:00 -0400

If Mitt Romney becomes the next president of the United States, how much are intelligence policies and programs likely to change? Not much. One of the most remarkable features of the past decade in the intelligence community has been the continuity from one administration to the next.

Romney likely would stay the course when it comes to the intelligence tools at the president’s disposal. These are the secret collection programs and clandestine operations that are the nearly exclusive domain of any commander in chief. But some big question marks loom for candidate Romney—as they do for Obama. Chief among them: how to manage the intelligence community in a time of shrinking budgets and how to curtail the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

What Will Stay the Same

Drone strikes. Unmanned aerial vehicles have become the pillar of U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, and they’re going to have a tremendous influence on foreign policy and military strategy in the years to come. Obama, like George W. Bush before him, sees drones as a way to save the lives of U.S. forces, because the robots go into battle where humans can’t. No president would discard this tool. Also, by September 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration must allow drones to fly in U.S. domestic airspace. So we might see robot aircraft patrolling the skies over the White House in the next president’s term.

Cyberwarfare. Washington now understands that the Internet is both a strategic asset and a risk for the U.S. economy and the government. Cyber defense has become a central operational mission of the Defense Department and the National Security Agency. (It always was for the Homeland Security Department.) And the intelligence community has demonstrated, with a cyberattack on Iran, that it has the capability—and the will—to unleash computer viruses on America’s adversaries. Expect more of that.

Special operations. The CIA, in concert with the military, has become an effective global killing force, dispatched on presidentially approved missions to fight the battles that drones can’t, at least not alone. The successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden solidified the role of special operations in fighting terrorists.

What Might Change

The size of the intelligence community is a moving target. As of this writing, the outcome of the battle over a potential budget sequestration is undetermined, but presumably it will be settled after the November elections. Budget reductions would scale back or cut some defense and intelligence programs. Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, has said there will be layoffs in the intelligence community workforce. But a President Romney would submit a new budget. And despite his apparent interest in shrinking the size of government, that doesn’t necessarily preclude saving—or even expanding—some intelligence programs.

Wild Card

Despite a cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, international inspectors report the country has accelerated its enrichment of uranium. Romney’s position on Iran and its alleged weapons program has been hard to discern. He has said containing Iran, which means accepting its construction of nuclear weapons as inevitable, is not a viable option.

But former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, recently wrote: “Even if Mitt Romney wins, there is no guarantee U.S. policy could change quickly enough to stop Iran.” Romney’s position on how to counter Iran is muddled. But the same is true for Obama.

Shane Harris, a former staff writer for Government Executive, is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.

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A Word About Leaks

Shane Harris — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Leaks of classified information are back in the news. Or more precisely, the hunt for leakers is making headlines again. After big news scoops on intelligence programs—involving counterterrorism operations in Yemen, drone strikes and a cyberwar campaign against Iran—lawmakers are accusing the White House of disclosing covert operations to make President Obama look strong on national security in an election year. The Obama administration, which has prosecuted an unprecedented number of government employees for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists, insists that the president abhors leaks and no one in the White House gave away any national security secrets.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. And it all depends on how you define the word “leak.” For argument’s sake, let’s consider leaks to be disclosures of classified information. Officials reveal all kinds of information every day that could be sensitive or potentially embarrassing, but isn’t covered by a classification regime.

The next question is whether the leak was authorized.

Authorized leaking happens all the time in Washington. If the president tells his counterterrorism adviser to give a speech on the United States’ use of drones to kill terrorists—which he did recently—the president has effectively declassified whatever information his adviser relays.

Authorized leaks were also a part of at least one of the recent news scoops that has so many officials in a lather. David E. Sanger, a reporter for The New York Times and the author of the book Confront and Conceal (Crown, 2012), revealed new details about the administration’s cyberwar tactics. Sanger tells us in his book that he was granted access to almost every member of the president’s national security team. Such access is rare and is the result, in part, of a decision by the Obama administration to disclose certain secrets. They might not have been the most startling revelations that Sanger discovered in his reporting—which was surely based on some un-authorized leaks—or even the most secret. But the mere fact that officials were talking with a journalist about intelligence programs meant leaks of some kind were blessed at a high level.

It’s the unauthorized leaks that tend to cause the most controversy and put government employees in the most danger. How do we know when a leak is unauthorized? For reporters, it can be hard to tell sometimes, but a good indication is if the person sharing the information says, “I could lose my job over this.” Or, “I might go to jail for this.”

Does it follow that the information shared in an unauthorized leak must be more sensitive, more revealing, more potentially damaging to the United States than the authorized leak? Absolutely not.

Former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was not authorized to talk to journalists when he contacted a reporter forThe Baltimore Sun and told her about wasteful spending at NSA. The information he conveyed was nowhere near as sensitive as secrets about drone strikes or cyberwar. And yet, the Justice Department indicted Drake under the 1917 Espionage Act for illegally disclosing classified information.

Drake insisted he’d done no such thing, and the dubious case against him fell apart before it went to trial. But it proved an essential point: In matters of leaks, it’s not the leak itself that’s at issue, but whether it was authorized. When lower level career employees make that decision—however more principled it may be—they’re open to prosecution.

No system of secrecy can work if people are allowed to arbitrarily break its rules. But a decision to leak may be arbitrary, too, even if it was authorized.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State and was a staff writer for Government Executive.

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A Word About Leaks

Shane Harris — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The next question is whether the leak was authorized.

Does it follow that the information shared in an unauthorized leak must be more sensitive, more revealing, more potentially damaging to the United States than the authorized leak? Absolutely not.

Former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was not authorized to talk to journalists when he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and told her about wasteful spending at NSA. The information he conveyed was nowhere near as sensitive as secrets about drone strikes or cyberwar. And yet, the Justice Department indicted Drake under the 1917 Espionage Act for illegally disclosing classified information.

No system of secrecy can work if people are allowed to arbitrarily break its rules. But a decision to leak may be arbitrary, too, even if it was authorized.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State and was a staff writer for Government Executive.

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The Dream Team

Shane Harris — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:00:00 -0400

Call me jaded, but the list of Mitt Romney’s intelligence advisers just seems, well, blah. Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, and ex-CIA director Michael Hayden are the two men the Republican presidential hopeful has named as co-chairmen of his “counterterrorism and intelligence” brain trust. Each man brings a wealth of experience—and recent at that—but the picks are just so predictable. The other names of “special advisers” are all familiar too.

I realize the bench isn’t that deep when it comes to intel expertise, but I have to think an aspiring president could come up with a more imaginative panel.

So, in that spirit, here’s a bit of an unusual list of experts whom Romney—or any candidate, for that matter—might do well to consult. I offer no endorsements, and I’m quite certain many of the people I’m nominating would refuse an offer—and not just because some are Democrats. But these folks have particular, and in some cases unique, expertise that could benefit the candidate, and ultimately the intelligence community.

Charlie Allen, éminence grise. Hayden and Chertoff are already on the list, so why not Allen? He’s a principal at the Chertoff Group, and he has more years in service of the intelligence community than both of them put together. His last big job in government was running intelligence for the Homeland Security Department, which really wasn’t an important job until Allen showed up.

Ken Anderson, professor of law, American University Washington College of Law. He is consistently ahead of the curve when it comes to predicting the legal implications of national security operations. Anderson was among the first to foresee that drone strikes would become especially controversial and be branded by critics as extralegal executions.

Missy Cummings, director, MIT Humans and Automation Laboratory. A former Navy fighter pilot, Cummings is possibly the smartest person you will ever meet on the subject of drones and autonomous weapons systems.

D. Scott Davis, chairman and chief executive officer of UPS and Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president and CEO of FedEx Corp. These executives bring expertise on two fronts. First, understanding globalization. How many other companies do business in so many places on Earth? Second, supply chain logistics. The Pentagon and the intelligence community are paying closer attention to technology that’s assembled overseas and makes its way into U.S. weapon systems. UPS and FedEx practically invented secure supply chains.

Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy, Center for Democracy and Technology. The center has been a consistent voice of reason and compromise on some of the thorniest security debates, particularly around electronic surveillance and privacy.

Michèle Flournoy, former undersecretary of Defense for policy. She was once considered a candidate to succeed Robert Gates as Defense secretary. Praised for her intellect and collegiality, Flournoy stands a good shot at being nominated down the road.

Jonathan Nolan, screenwriter. A candidate needs someone with a big imagination who’s far removed from the echo chamber of Washington. Nolan’s 2008 movie The Dark Knight was the first great post-Sept. 11 film, a profound and sadly prescient story about terrorism and our response to it.

John Poindexter, former national security adviser. He has thought more deeply than most about the power of technology in analysis and the threat it poses to personal privacy.

James Surowiecki, author and columnist. His book, The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, remains an indispensable primer on predictive analysis and the perils of groupthink.

Like I said, the nominees are un-expected and unlikely, but they are worth considering. Whomever Romney adds to his short list, these are the big issues that his advisers—and perhaps one day Romney himself—are going to face.

Shane Harris, a former staff writer at Government Executive, is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.

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More Robots On the Fly

Shane Harris — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

When you see an airplane zipping through the sky, or notice a traffic helicopter hovering over the freeway, you probably don’t ask yourself, “Is there a person flying that thing?” Give it a few years. Soon you’ll be wondering whether those aircraft are actually flown by human beings in a cockpit, or piloted by some remote controller at a computer terminal miles away.

Under a law that President Obama signed in February, the Federal Aviation Administration must begin plans for incorporating unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones, into national airspace. The hard deadline is September 2015, but as soon as this year, some groups, such as emergency responders, could start flying drones.

Until now, military and national intelligence agencies have had the most experience with remotely piloted aircraft, primarily on overseas missions. But as domestic airspace opens up, many more civilian agencies will find unmanned aircraft are ideally suited for their missions as well.

The Agriculture Department probably will turn to drones to monitor crops and livestock. The Forest Service might use the planes for spotting fires and relaying their location to ground crews. The Homeland Security Department already is testing drones for border surveillance. It’s a lot cheaper to put a fleet of robot airplanes over the border with Mexico than to deploy human patrols on the ground. It’s also a lot safer.

An FAA official recently told me there are so many models of drones—and more are expected in the future—that the field “almost defies categorization.” Some take off and land like a typical airplane. Others are launched by hand. Some land by dropping to the ground. A few are caught in nets. FAA’s challenge to license and regulate all those different vehicles may seem overwhelming, but consider what’s at stake. Not only do drones promise efficiencies and cost-savings for federal agencies, but the opening of U.S. airspace will create
a whole new market of commercial drones. The FAA official said it wasn’t unrealistic to imagine FedEx or UPS replacing some of their piloted cargo planes with drones in the near future.

But as soon as these planes take to the skies, court challenges almost certainly will follow. Federal law enforcement agencies will have to pay particular attention here. For instance, wide-area surveillance from high-altitude craft offers an extraordinary capability to monitor people. But is it legal? A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that police must obtain a warrant to place a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car might not apply to drones watching people as they walk down the street. The law isn’t settled on this question.

And beyond the legal quandaries, there are moral and ethical considerations as well. In the years to come, drones will have to become more autonomous to meet humans’ expectations. A pilot can control only so many drones at a time, and the more missions these craft are called on to perform, the more they’ll have to operate on their own. Are we really prepared to have planes overhead that are increasingly beyond our control?

Rather than answer these profound questions, legislators and policymakers
have opted first to get the drones in the air. There’s an understandable urge to take advantage of everything that unmanned technology has to offer. But people would do well to consider how the drones could change our world while they are still on the ground.

Shane Harris, a former staff writer at Government Executive, is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.

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Imperfect Harmony

Shane Harris — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:00:00 -0500

You’d be hard-pressed to name an intelligence initiative that has received more attention—or has been the subject of more debate and anxiety—than information sharing. After the 9/11 attacks, policymakers and managers indoctrinated the intelligence workforce in a “need to share” culture, and an official policy of “responsibility to provide” information to those who need it.

Now more than 10 years after the attacks, this effort sounds like a broken record. The more intelligence officials, experts and the press invoke the sharing mandate, like some kind of battle cry, the hollower it sounds. A reasonable policy is being reduced to a boilerplate of axioms and platitudes. So perhaps it’s time to send a different message: Information sharing actually is happening and it’s as good as it will ever get.

I don’t take credit for this idea. It comes from Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director of Central Intelligence for analysis and production and current president of the Intelligence and Security Academy, who spoke on a panel I moderated in 2011 about analytic trade-
craft. When it comes to information sharing, Lowenthal said, the government should follow the advice of former Sen. George David Aiken, who during the darkest days of the Vietnam War suggested that the United States should “declare victory and go home.”

It’s a compelling idea. After all, intelligence agencies have made demonstrable progress since the pre-9/11 days. Many of the legal barriers that inhibited common-sense collaboration were removed quickly after the attacks, and they haven’t resurfaced. Officials established the National Counterterrorism Center as the hub for threat reporting from across the community, and today it’s staffed by analysts from every agency.
My own anecdotal reporting during the past 10 years suggests that there is an information sharing mind-set, and while it’s not uniform, it has taken hold at many levels of the community.

Information sharing hasn’t produced perfect results—but no one ever said it would. The counterterrorism center failed to detect the so-called underwear bomber in 2009, but not because there’s an aversion to sharing. Indeed, thousands of intelligence reports flow into the center every day, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to isolate the most important ones. Analysts failed to put together the pieces because there was no technological system in place for alerting to them to what they already were sharing in huge volumes.

Some legal barriers to sharing remain, but for good reason. For example, as a bulwark against civil liberties abuse, there are rules that prevent the Homeland Security Department from merging some of the information it maintains on American citizens with foreign intelligence databases at agencies such as the CIA.

Policymakers will debate the merits and usefulness of particular hurdles like this. But has any reasonable person ever suggested that we have to do away with all such restrictions to achieve intelligence harmony? No.

Intelligence isn’t a perfect business. That’s why Lowenthal’s admonition to stop striving for perfection resonates with me. I presume it does as well with his colleagues, many of whom suffer public recrimination for their mistakes. I’m not suggesting policymakers and the public demand less of our nation’s spies. Instead, they should consider revising their own expectations.

Just because the information sharing drumbeat ends doesn’t mean intelligence agencies will stop collaborating. We’re past the point where this policy needs to be drilled into people’s heads. If it hasn’t stuck by now, then it never will. Perhaps everyone’s time would be better spent keeping the current system working well rather than trying to reach some intelligence nirvana that will forever remain beyond people’s reach.

Shane Harris is author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, and senior writer at The Washingtonian.

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INTELLIGENCE FILE Ditching The Dots

Shane Harris — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Is it time for us to retire an overused expression?

Here's a phrase that some intelligence analysts would like to retire from the American vernacular: "connect the dots." I've gotten an earful about it during the past few months, mostly from counterterrorism professionals who say it oversimplifies what they do. "My kids connect the dots, usually in crayon," more than one offended analyst has told me.

The Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines connecting the dots as something "done or proceeding in a series of simple and usually predictable steps." This fails to capture what it's like to track terrorist networks and unravel plots. The process rarely is simple or predictable, nor is it orderly.

And yet the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms suggests a meaning that works well: "to understand the relationship between different ideas or experiences." This gets closer to the fragmentary, nonlinear nature of an intelligence analyst's craft.

I'm not sure who first put this metaphor in our common phrase book. But if it's really inapt, we might consider replacing it. So, I asked some aggrieved parties for suggestions. Here are four.

Putting together a puzzle: This one works well since analysts may have the information they need within their grasp, but lack an understanding of how it all fits together. A variation says terrorism analysis is like trying to arrange the pieces without the benefit of the picture on the box. Of course, analysts usually don't have all the pieces, either.

Making a pearl: The idea here is that tiny bits of information accrete over time until the entire story forms. This does the job if you like to think of analysis as an iterative process, and an often lengthy one. But it doesn't apply to its fragmented, harried side.

Crystal balling: This connotes magic and sorcery, and that's the wrong way to think about a logical process like intelligence investigating. Analysts also don't predict the future, although they sometimes rate the likelihood of different plausible outcomes.

Discovering hidden connections: This isn't a metaphor, but I've heard it used favorably, in part because it makes analysis seem like detective work, which in turn makes it seem a lot sexier than it often is. But it strikes me as too literal. And it relies on that ugly word "connect."

Connect the dots endures in this case because it's simpler and easier to remember than any of these would-be usurpers. Yet that simplicity works against the analysts. Many people are outraged when they hear that the intelligence community failed to foresee a terrorist attack. "How hard can this be? After all, children can do it." The phrase lowers expectations and raises them at the same time.

I continue to look for a fit successor to a much-maligned expression. But I've yet to find it. Nothing quite seems to connect.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, and senior writer at The Washingtonian.

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INTELLIGENCE FILE Dodging the Budget Ax

Shane Harris — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The intelligence community is bracing for spending cuts.

When Congress and the White House reached a hard-fought agreement to raise the debt ceiling in August, intelligence officials had little reason to celebrate. The deal centers on future budget cuts, hundreds of billions of dollars of which could come from defense and national security programs.

It's not clear which sacred cows could be led to slaughter; in fact, there's nothing in the new law that says precisely how much Defense Department spending must decrease. (Defense comprises by far the largest portion of the $80 billion annual intelligence budget.)

Arguably, the law could have mandated even deeper cuts than it does. But a new committee of lawmakers is looking for as much as $1.5 trillion more in deficit-reducing savings, and what they spare from Defense or military accounts, they could easily take from costly and perhaps nonessential spy agency programs. The Homeland Security Department's budget also could end up on the block, under the terms of the deal.

Intelligence officials were preparing for this moment long before the debt ceiling debate consumed Washington. In May, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a professional organization for current and former intelligence employees, issued a report that warned against excessive cuts, particularly to counterterrorism operations. Their argument was that although al Qaeda has been weakened in recent years, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down, and Osama bin Laden is dead, this is still not the time to turn back the tide of ever-rising budgets.

The intelligence community has fought this battle before. The post-Cold War "peace dividend" led to a reduction in human intelligence gathering, which didn't help the CIA and other agencies' efforts to track bin Laden in the run-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. One should expect frequent allusions to that fateful period in history during the coming months as intelligence advocates face off with a deficit committee that is required to close its deal by Thanksgiving.

Intelligence spending is predictably cyclical. In times of relative peace, money dries up. Policymakers tend to fund espionage only when they feel like they need it. Agencies have no visible constituency-after all, the work they do is mostly secret. And the mantra "Support the troops" doesn't naturally encompass spy masters and analysts, even if the work they do is life-threatening.

For officials to stave off cuts now, they'll have to make a tight connection in lawmakers' minds between the soldier on the battlefield and the data cruncher sitting behind a computer in the safety of a base or an office building. That has never been an easy sell. It won't be this time either.

Shane Harris is a former staff writer for Government Executive and author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State.

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The Drones Race

Shane Harris — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Officials should start thinking about how to control the spread of unmanned aircraft.

The global drones race is upon us. Today, more than 50 countries use unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance. Armed with high-resolution cameras and electronic sensors, these remote-controlled planes are quickly becoming the preferred method for intelligence collection on the battlefield and at home.

Only a handful of countries have armed drones, and the United States is by far the world's leader when it comes to the navigational sophistication of these aircraft, the weapons systems they carry and the size of its fleet.

But that gap is narrowing. A front-page story in The Washington Post recently reported that at China's biggest air show this year, "crowds swarmed around a model of an armed, jet-propelled drone and marveled at the accompanying display of its purported martial prowess." A video animation showed the drone launching an unchallenged attack on what looked like a U.S. aircraft carrier group floating off the shores of Taiwan. Message from China to the United States: Anything you can build, we can build better.

That's probably an exaggeration, of course. And one should expect a lot of public chest-thumping from the Chinese since much of what they know about unmanned aerial technology they probably stole from U.S. manufacturers. Their drones are likely to remain technically inferior to ours for years to come.

But that should offer little comfort to the Pentagon and the intelligence community. The fact is, a country doesn't need the sleekest, most advanced drone to carry a surveillance camera or to fire a missile. Drones pose a low barrier to entry for countries, or nonstate groups, that want to practice a new kind of remote warfare, one in which human beings make different strategic calculations because they are never in any danger. Drones make war cheaper and of less consequence. And as drones become more autonomous-able to take off and land on their own, and fly to their targets without constant minding from a "pilot"-they will make the conduct of warfare a less human exercise.

The United States recognizes the dangers of global drone proliferation, which is why the government exercises export controls on U.S. drone manufacturers.

But those controls can't stop other countries from selling their advanced drones to governments that we'd prefer didn't have them. And since so many countries already have figured out how to rig up a drone with a camera, it won't be long until they add a missile. The global drones race, and particularly China's highly publicized push into this area, will put pressure on the United States to arm its allies in the region. On a recent trip to Japan, this was a recurring theme I encountered even in casual conversation with strangers. The Post reported that in the wake of a territorial dispute with China last fall, the Japanese sent military officials to the United States to study the operations of high-altitude surveillance drones.

The momentum in the United States on "drone policy," such as it is, is a tactical one-building remote-controlled aircraft that can fly higher, longer and with less chance of detection. There is no comparable attention devoted to thinking through the strategic security challenges, and also the moral ones, that will come from the drones race. There is no appetite for a drones counterproliferation treaty because the United States doesn't want to relinquish its lead in military and intelligence. But as that lead becomes less of a security buffer against countries like China, policymakers will have to seriously consider an international agreement that limits the spread of drones and what countries are allowed to do with them.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, and a former staff writer at Government Executive.

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No Talking

Shane Harris — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

While politicians took credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, career employees were told to keep quiet.

Intelligence agency employees are getting mixed messages these days. On one hand, President Obama and other senior members of his administration have praised the work of the CIA and others who tracked down and helped kill Osama bin Laden. On the other, employees are being told to stop talking about their successes to journalists, and they've even been threatened with criminal prosecution.

Apparently, a number of intelligence community employees, eager to tell the story of their good work, have let slip some secrets. The Washington Post published two of the most revealing accounts-the presence of a CIA safe house near bin Laden's hide-out in Pakistan, and the use of a stealth drone, which was able to conduct long-term reconnaissance of the site and evade detection by Pakistani's air-defense systems.

In May, outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta sent an agencywide memo warning employees to keep mum about the operation, noting, "an unprecedented amount of sensitive-in fact, classified-information [is] making its way into the press." He should know, of course. Senior members of the administration were falling over themselves within hours of the raid to regale journalists with detailed accounts of the daring exploit. The White House posted a background briefing by senior administration officials on its website.

It appears that career employees who talked to reporters were merely taking their cues from their politically appointed bosses. For several days, a reporter needed only pick up the phone and ask for an interview about some aspect of the strike, and the request was happily obliged. I personally asked for, and received, details from career officials unaccustomed to talking to the press, details that, if they were unclassified, had been so for only a matter of hours.

In his letter, Panetta admonished his staff that leaks would be turned over to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. To threaten employees at their moment of greatest triumph seems counterproductive, and demonstrably unfair, given that the White House leaked like a sieve. (And some of its accounts of what happened in bin Laden's house turned out not to be accurate.)

It would be tempting to write off Panetta's warning as a friendly, if stern, reminder of employees' obligations to protect classified information. Except that today, the Obama administration has mounted criminal prosecutions against two former intelligence officers, a contract analyst and an Army private in cases related to unauthorized disclosure of information. To put those numbers in perspective, the administration has conducted more prosecutions of leaks than all previous administrations combined. It also has made extensive use of the 1917 Espionage Act, a statute usually reserved for traitors and spies.

It's clear that the administration got ahead of itself in recounting the bin Laden raid. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS News that on the day of the operation, senior officials had agreed to share little of the information, but the plan essentially fell apart within hours. It would be naïve, bordering on absurd, to presume that an event this momentous wouldn't be widely discussed.

Given the extraordinarily hostile attitude toward leaks today, the administration is sending the wrong message by brandishing the threat of investigations and prison. It doesn't inspire employees to take risks, which was so essential to the effort to kill bin Laden. And on a more basic level, it's just hypocritical. Having reported on intelligence for more than a decade now, I can't remember many times when so many career employees were willing to talk to a journalist. Many of them were following the lead of political officials, who were just as eager to trumpet their victory in public.

Shane Harris is senior writer for Washingtonian magazine and the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State.

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The Price of Candor

Shane Harris — Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When it comes to the toughest calls, lawmakers can't always handle the truth.

When Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March that government forces in Libya probably would win out over protesters and rebels, you could almost hear the collective head-slapping across town. The political class, at least, thought it a gaffe bordering on disloyalty that the nation's top intelligence official dared suggest, at a time when the United States was contemplating a military intervention, that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi "is in this for the long haul," and that "over the longer term the regime will prevail."

Headline writers were aghast. Reporters asked the White House whether President Obama still had faith in his intelligence adviser. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., no great fan of Clapper, called for the DNI's resignation. "Some of his analysis could prove to be accurate, but it should not have been made in such a public forum," Graham says.

Clapper's candid assessment, which was a lot more nuanced than it was reported in the press, begs a question of policymakers. What, precisely, do they want from their intelligence professionals?

Do they want intelligence leaders to speak their mind, or should they toe a party line? Should analysts speak truth to power, or should they tune their remarks to the prevailing political frequency? Just because Clapper, or any DNI, serves at the pleasure of the president, should he be expected to say only things that the president wants to hear? Clearly, the knee-jerk answer in Washington is, yes, if the DNI wants to keep his job. And that's upsetting, because it means policymakers haven't learned one of the most important lessons of every major intelligence failure of the past decade: It's essential that professionals be empowered to call it like they see it, and they cannot be cowed by an adverse political reaction.

We learned from the flawed prewar national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons programs that marginalizing divergent opinions doesn't help policy- makers make better decisions. In that instance, a contrarian State Department analysis that Iraq wasn't pursuing a nuclear weapons program was relegated to the status of footnotes. As it turned out, this unpopular conclusion was correct. But intelligence leaders who approved the final document gave in to group think, and to the pressures of an administration that had long since made up its mind that a war in Iraq was the right way to go. George Tenet, the top intelligence adviser to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, should have made more of the minority views, but he was always too inclined to please his bosses.

A few years ago, Clapper gave a speech in Chicago and expressed regret for having signed off on the Iraq estimate when he was the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Clapper bears the scars of a bad call, which might help explain why he's so willing to speak out now. There could be reasons why Clapper isn't suited for the job of DNI. He appeared dangerously out of touch last year when he confessed in a television interview that he didn't know about a major terrorist plot broken up in London four hours earlier. But to pillory Clapper for his honesty is to tell future intelligence leaders-and the community at large-that sticking out their necks will only bring down the ax. I can think of few better ways to guarantee another catastrophic intelligence failure.

Shane Harris is senior writer at Washingtonian magazine and the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. He's a former staff writer for Government Executive.

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One Bad Apple

Shane Harris — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

What the Tucson shooting teaches us about the dangers of wrong intelligence.

In the hours after a gunman shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others in Tucson, Ariz., the information coming from the scene was chaotic and contradictory. News organizations ran with early reports-which proved false-that Giffords had died. One outlet, Fox News, broadcast another troubling report that the Homeland Security Department had linked the alleged gunman, Jared Loughner, to a group believed to have ties to white supremacists.

Essentially every part of that story was wrong. The group in question, American Renaissance, said it was mischaracterized as a supremacist or nationalist group, and it had no record of any contacts with Loughner. The claim of a link, cited by Fox as contained in a DHS memo, also was misstated. The connection actually was made in a document prepared by the Arizona Counterterrorism Information Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that have been set up in various states and cities in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and that are supposed to help coordinate terrorism information with federal, state and local authorities.

It goes without saying that this information is supposed to be accurate, based on verifiable leads and not, as it turns out was the case in Tucson, the speculation of fusion center employees. The fusion center commander, David Denlinger, who's a major with the Arizona State Police, told Politico that the document "was never intended for public dissemination. . . . It was simply two people that put a quick summary together for their bosses in terms of here are some things that are being looked at right now."

And yet the document, or some official description of it, was leaked to the press. It only added to the confusion surrounding the shooting and embroiled Homeland Security once again in the ongoing controversy about whether it's unfairly profiling conservative political groups. Whatever the agenda of American Renaissance, the fusion center in Arizona just didn't have its facts straight.

Uncertainty is the hallmark of any criminal investigation, particularly one taken up in a moment of crisis. But the knock on fusion centers has long been that they try to make connections where there are none, and if their wrong interpretations make their way into the public space, it's hard to retract them. The damage is done. The dots can't be unconnected.

I spent time a few years ago at a fusion center in Los Angeles, and I was astounded by the number of tips and leads-many of them frankly bizarre-that the staff looked at for some connection to terrorism or other violent crime. It was clear then that the fusion center analysts had to be especially careful, because the product of their work was shared among multiple agencies at different levels of government. That increased the chances that erroneous information could leak out, or be misinterpreted by another party.

It might be tempting to dismiss the damage done in the Tuscon case because the erroneous report involves an apparently deranged alleged murderer, and because it was retracted by the government. But this episode should serve as a warning about the dangers of on-the-fly analysis. The report on Loughner should have stayed private, if it ever should have been prepared in the first place.

Presumably, law enforcement authorities in Tucson and from the FBI were on the case when the memo was written. One wonders why the fusion center was involved at all, but clearly, it was operating out of its league.

Shane Harris is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine and a former staff writer for Government Executive. His book The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, is out in paperback.

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Spies’ Growing Pains

Shane Harris — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The CIA has had to rethink human intelligence.

First the bad news. Last month marked the anniversary of the deadliest attack on CIA employees in a quarter century. On Dec. 30, 2009, a man the CIA believed was an al Qaeda informant, but who was actually a double agent, blew himself up on a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. He killed seven CIA employees and contractors, including one of the top trackers of al Qaeda working in government at the time. An official review determined the employees in Khost relaxed their rigid security procedures because they didn't want to alienate the informant, who they badly wanted to believe could provide the whereabouts of top terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden's deputy.

The bomber wasn't put through a metal detector, nor was he given a thorough pat-down to see whether he might be hiding explosives on his body.

Now the good news. In November 2010, the CIA, working with their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, averted two possible midair disasters when they intercepted and defused bombs cleverly hidden inside computer printers. That victory was also the product of human intelligence, which this time turned out to be genuine. In fact, it was so specific that officials were able to identify the deadly packages by their UPS and FedEx tracking numbers.

What do we make of these two cases, which had such vastly different outcomes? It's this: The war on terror will be won or lost on the strength of human intelligence-the tips, leads and, yes, information obtained under duress that the CIA has been trying to gather with mixed results since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Most of the foiled terrorist plots in the past year were the result of so-called HUMINT. The plot to use beauty products to build subway bombs, the cargo bombs attempt, and a string of drone strikes in Pakistan that have taken out top terrorist leaders all depended on human spies providing specific enough details for U.S. officials to take action. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, intelligence experts predicted the CIA would have to recruit a network of spies abroad to get inside al Qaeda terrorist rings. That's happening now.

The drone strikes offer the best indication of how dependable the spy network in Pakistan has become. If we're to believe the reporting from official sources, and from the terrorists themselves, people on the ground are helping to show the CIA where to aim its planes and their missiles. Without this information, the drones have nothing to attack.

And yet the Khost bombing makes us question whether the CIA is as skilled with its spies as the drone war suggests. Officials were duped by their Jordanian informant. They believed he could lead them to al Qaeda's inner circle and that he had developed a public cover as a militant jihadist. The fact that he played the CIA so well means we have to question its basic process for vetting potential spies. Headquarters now is doing just that. Officials are assigning more, and presumably better-trained, counterintelligence officers to detect dubious informants and double agents. One wonders why it took seven deaths to get this kind of rigor into the process.

The attack in Khost and the intelligence victories of late remind us-tragically-that spying isn't a perfect business, and we shouldn't expect it to be. But they also remind us that no amount of sophisticated technology can replace the eyes and ears on the ground.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, which comes out in paperback this month.

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ANALYSIS:Intelligence File Quiet on Drones

Shane Harris — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Pressure is building for President Obama to rein in one of the CIA's favorite weapons.

The CIA continues drone strikes in Pakistan at record rates, and while no one in the administration will officially confirm the drone program exists, it's well-known that President Obama's national security team has embraced the remote aircraft as one of its best weapons against terrorists. Behind the scenes, administration officials have been hashing out the legal framework that allows the United States to kill people abroad, including American citizens. But pressure continues to mount from some of Obama's closest allies to disband the drone program, which they view as an illegal form of extrajudicial assassination.

Why would any president, particularly one whose base relies on liberals and progressives, embrace a regime of targeted killing without having a very good legal defense? After talking to international lawyers and intelligence officials during the past few months, this emerges as the big, un- answered question.

To date, the Obama administration still hasn't articulated a full-throated doctrine for why using drones is legitimate under international law. Even the most strident supporters of drone strikes believe they could be deemed illegal under the laws of war-and not only by a foreign court, but potentially by an American judge as well. The most specific defense for drone killings has come from Harold Hongju Koh, the legal adviser to the State Department and the official who ensures the U.S. complies with its treaties. In a March 25 speech before the American Society of International Law's annual meeting, Koh said, "The United States is in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces, in response to the horrific 9/11 attacks, and might use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defense under international law."

Even the most strident critics of drones agree the United States can legitimately claim self-defense in attacking al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. But most of the CIA drone strikes happen in Pakistan, a nation with which the United States is not at war and that wasn't harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces before Sept. 11, 2001.

Koh suggested because al Qaeda is at war with the United States, the United States is free to hunt and kill al Qaeda members who aren't on the battlefields of Afghanistan. So, would it be legal for the CIA to kill Osama bin Laden if he were in Germany? Or London? There's not a clear-cut answer to that. And officials have avoided giving a direct one. Fortunately for them, they haven't had to. Bin Laden is still presumably hiding in the "lawless" regions of tribal Pakistan. As long as he stays in that gray area, the administration has some wiggle room to kill him.

Before Koh's speech, the drone program rested on a creaky legal foundation.

After the speech, the foundation is on slightly firmer ground. But the administration hasn't settled this question of where the battlefield in the war on terror actually ends. The issue got even more complicated in early October when a drone strike killed eight militants in Pakistan who were reportedly German. The lack of clarity around drone strikes creates a huge vulnerability for a president whose base already is growing dis-enchanted with the man they elected to change U.S. security policy. In recent conversations with some of the most vocal opponents of the drone program, they've made clear their intentions to redouble their efforts to either rein in the attacks or stop them altogether. They will make trouble for Obama.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. He covered intelligence and technology at Government Executive from 2001 to 2005.

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The Outsiders

Shane Harris — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In July, The Washington Post ran a three-part series headlined "Top Secret America," which depicted an intelligence contractor workforce so vast and unmanageable that not even the secretary of Defense could say how many nongovernmental employees were in his office. For anyone who has worked in the intelligence community for any length of time, this information was neither surprising nor especially revealing.

Indeed, the Post's breathless coverage recalled that ironic scene in Casablanca when Capt. Renault walks into Rick's bar and casino and declares, "I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!"

This publication and several others have devoted hundreds of pages over the years to the story of outsourcing intelligence. They have chronicled the waste, fraud and abuse committed by the "body shops" that supply intelligence agencies with the private workers they need to perform their missions. Books have been written that catalog the deficiencies that attend this strategy, as have dozens of government audits. What made the Post's series so surprising wasn't that it mischaracterized the downsides of intelligence contracting -- it got those right -- but that it presented this trend as previously unrecognized.

Contract workers began showing up on sensitive missions years before the Sept. 11 attacks. In the 1990s, ex-soldiers found themselves redeploying with their comrades-in-arms, but this time the contract workers were wearing corporate logos on their shirts. The 2001 terrorist attacks came mostly as a surprise to an intelligence workforce that had been pruned in the fallout of the Cold War. Seasoned employees had retired, in search of more lucrative private pastures. When the agencies ramped up for the war on terror, they hired back their old staff on contracts.

Although we know this narrative well, no one defends the outcome. There are good reasons to want more government employees doing government jobs. Chief among them are greater accountability and cost control. But few people have much to offer in the way of alternatives that would right the balance. In large part, that's because the nature of the intelligence workforce -- and the intelligence employee -- has changed.

More than half the current workforce joined after September 2001. For them, committing to a career at a single agency, or even in a single profession, is anathema. If they make a career of intelligence, most will do it from the corporate side, where they'll enjoy more professional freedom and be able to engage the wanderlust that defines the 21st century worker.

So here's an idea. Instead of trying to hang on to an entire workforce, invest more time and energy in training those who stay how to better manage their private counterparts. Although this would treat the trend toward contractors as irreversible, it is a realistic response to what's been happening for more than a decade.

Intelligence officials have done admirable work creating employment policies and incentives to retain today's government professionals, and they should continue that effort. But they also should direct more of their policy energy toward improving contractor management and oversight. Too often, this is treated as a parochial concern of interest only to procurement professionals. This is a myopic and dangerously misguided approach to running intelligence.

The government hasn't failed to manage its contractor workforce simply because it's so big. Rather, there aren't enough people in government today who really understand how to manage contracts on today's scale.

Intelligence leaders didn't need a newspaper exposé to tell them this, but it was a useful reminder.

Their next moves will tell us how closely they've paid attention.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. He was a staff writer at Government Executive from 2001-2005.

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ANALYSIS:Intelligence File The Outsiders

Shane Harris — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Contractors are here to stay. So, train federal employees how to manage them better.

Indeed, the Post's breathless coverage recalled that ironic scene in Casablanca when Capt. Renault walks into Rick's bar and casino and declares, "I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!"

This publication and several others have devoted hundreds of pages over the years to the story of outsourcing intelligence. They have chronicled the waste, fraud and abuse committed by the "body shops" that supply intelligence agencies with the private workers they need to perform their missions. Books have been written that catalog the deficiencies that attend this strategy, as have dozens of government audits. What made the Post's series so surprising wasn't that it mischaracterized the downsides of intelligence contracting-it got those right-but that it presented this trend as previously unrecognized.

Intelligence leaders didn't need a newspaper exposé to tell them this, but it was a useful reminder.

Their next moves will tell us how closely they've paid attention.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. He was a staff writer at Government Executive from 2001-2005.

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War of Words

Shane Harris — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The rhetoric of cyberwar is heating up.

There's been a war of words lately over the meaning of war-specifically, cyberwar. What is it? How do we recognize it? When it happens, what's the appropriate response? These aren't academic questions. As the Defense Department stands up a new Cyber Command, the definition of war in the ungovernable expanse of the Internet is a fundamental problem, still unanswered.

Among the technological cognoscenti, two camps are taking shape, and their critiques and counterpoints-played out in blog posts, Twitter streams and op-eds-are giving way to personal invective. One camp holds that the United States is engaged in cyberwar right now, and it's losing. This war is being fought against shadowy hacker groups, some of which are employed as proxies by the United States' main strategic rivals, China and Russia. Every day, they make thousands of attempts to penetrate government and corporate computer systems. Those who ignore this persistent threat do so at the nation's peril, as hackers continue to steal vital information and disrupt operations.

The other camp holds that while malicious activity permeates cyberspace, the "cyberwar" label was cooked up by former government officials who now work for security consulting firms. They're in line to receive the billions of dollars in cyber defense spending forecast for the public and private sector in the next few years, and so these cyber Cassandras have an incentive to promote fear and obscure reality. They stand ready to ignite a cyber arms race by refashioning criminal hackers as marauding Internet soldiers.

What's missing from this debate is a better sense of what the real nature of a cyber threat is. Cyberwar is a legitimate term. But it's only narrowly applicable. In the United States, it describes computer-based attacks by the military on the computer networks of its adversaries to cause harm in the real world. That latter point is essential. In 2007, the military hacked into the cell phones of insurgents in Iraq in order to send them misleading text messages that lured them into traps. Ask the military's cyberwarriors how they view what they do, and they'll tell you a computer is a weapon, but not a lethal one on its own. The entire point of cyberwar is to cause some damage in the offline world. v Cyberwar is the wrong term to use when describing the thousands of attempts each day to steal information from sensitive government and corporate computer networks. This is espionage, plain and simple. When Google accused hackers in China of pilfering the company's trade secrets, that really was an allegation of industrial spying. When U.S. officials are warned not to carry any sensitive information on their laptops or phones when traveling in China-and preferably to leave all their electronic equipment at home-they're being schooled in counterintelligence. To call this "warfare" offers no remedy. What is the United States supposed to do when the Chinese government steals from an American company. Bomb Beijing?

The war of words over cyberwar is an important debate. But it's time to step back and take a deep breath. The distinction between war and espionage is only a first step, but it takes us in the right direction.

The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. He covered intelligence and technology at Government Executive from 2001 to 2005.

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Listening In

Shane Harris — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In 1978, when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there were only a few ways to secretly capture someone's private conversations. One was a wiretap on a phone line. Another was through wireless signals, snatching a communication as it bounced between transmitters and receivers, or from a distance with powerful microphones. The simplicity of this predigital surveillance is illustrated in the 1974 film The Conversation, featuring Gene Hackman as crack private detective Harry Caul, who builds listening devices in a hobby shop like some techno-Geppetto.

Back then, the laws governing intelligence surveillance were written to restrict collection: when the government could monitor; whom it could target; and with what kinds of equipment. With just a few ways to spy on someone, it made sense to control surveillance this way. Laws like FISA were a reaction to collection abuses of the preceding years, when government authorities illegally wiretapped activists and politicians. The collection-focused law strengthened privacy protections by limiting spying on the front end.

This is all rather quaint by today's standards. The Harry Cauls of the 21st century find an unlimited trove of information on the Internet. Their counterparts in the intelligence community barely can remember when wiretapping meant actually clamping a recording machine onto a piece of copper, rather than siphoning off gargantuan streams of digital packets from fiber-optic networks. And yet, the laws governing intelligence surveillance still are written with a 1970s mind-set: They're largely about the acquisition of information.

They should be focused on the use of that information. The use of information determines whether analysts achieve a breakthrough in understanding terrorist networks, or whether they fail to connect the dots about the next attack. It's in the use of information that agencies either respect individual privacy or infringe on it. By contrast, collection is occurring at such a breakneck pace it's practically an afterthought. Every day, approximately 10,000 names and leads pour into the National Counterterrorism Center. Analysts there are overloaded with sources.

What would a new law of information look like? For starters, it would take aim at the two fundamental questions every agency must answer now: Is information being used effectively? And is it being used properly? We know from the failed Christmas Day attack that various components of the counterterrorism community had useful data in their hands about the alleged underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But there was no mechanism in place for alerting those agencies to each other's knowledge. A new law could require agencies to do this kind of cross-checking and to get to work building an automated system to help them do it.

A new law also could enhance privacy protections for Americans who find themselves enmeshed in intelligence surveillance. Today, classified "minimization procedures" govern this process. They vary among agencies, but generally require that names and identifying features of anyone not actually a target of surveillance to be redacted from official reports. A new law could require technology not just to keep track of Americans names, and to shield them when appropriate, but also to track how analysts are using the information about those people and whether they're breaching any rules in the process, and to report violations more thoroughly and frequently.

These are practical measures. But there are few incentives for lawmakers to act on them, because extraordinary controversy will follow any public acknowledgement of what they, and every intelligence professional, already know: There are few technical or even legal impediments to the intelligence community collecting data on just about anyone. Changing the law to reflect that will require a level of political courage that's in short supply.

Shane Harris, the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, was a writer and technology editor at Government Executive for five years.

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ANALYSIS:Intelligence File Listening In

Shane Harris — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Surveillance laws should focus on how agencies use information, not how they collect it.

Shane Harris, the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, was a writer and technology editor at Government Executive for five years.

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Legal adviser: Drone position will be explained

Shane Harris — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The Obama administration has asserted a legal position on the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists and militants, and officials plan to share the details "at an appropriate moment," according to Harold Koh, the State Department's legal adviser.

National Journal asked Koh, the senior official responsible for international legal issues, to share his views after his public remarks at an American Bar Association speech on Wednesday. "I have studied this question," Koh said. "I think that the legal objections that are being put on the table are ones that we are taking into account. I am comfortable with the legal position of the administration, and at an appropriate moment we will set for that in some detail."

The administration has made drone strikes the centerpiece of its fight against terrorists, but officials have never said why they believe the program complies with international law. A number of legal scholars and international officials have said the killings could violate certain laws of armed conflict, particularly when they're carried out in countries where the United States is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen.

Koh gave no indication of when the administration might unveil its legal rationale or what it might entail. But he added, "You can expect a more detailed discussion of this to come." Koh was reluctant to reveal specifics, and he said that the informal venue of a speech was not the appropriate setting to discuss the "complicated" issue.

Some scholars have argued that the United States can justify drone killings of terrorists and militants who would attack Americans on the grounds of self-defense. But, as National Journal reported in January, a growing chorus of experts believes the drone strikes could be deemed extrajudicial killings. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see all documents that might illuminate the administration's legal thinking on the matter.

Given the political consensus in Washington that drone attacks are effective, safe and palatable tools for killing foreign terrorists, the Obama administration presumably would refute any suggestion the strikes were illegal.

Koh is a prolific writer and authority on human rights, civil liberties and the application of international law, and in his former position as the dean of Yale Law School, he was a vocal critic of the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies. Koh declined an earlier request on the subject of drone strikes, but an extensive survey of his writings suggested that he might take issue with the drone program, at least as it is currently designed.

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ANALYSIS:Intelligence File Afghanistan’s Spy Surge

Shane Harris — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A new war effort will stress the intelligence community.

The U.S. military's successful troop surge in Iraq in 2007 benefited greatly from a parallel intelligence surge that remained largely unheralded at the time. According to former intelligence and military officials, a wealth of precise information on the movements of insurgents and foreign fighters came in from a variety of secret operations. Chief among them was a cyberattack by the National Security Agency on the phones and computers that roadside bombers used to coordinate their strikes on U.S. forces. Intelligence also came pouring in from unmanned drones capable of loitering for hours over their targets and from sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment deployed in the war zone. Coupled with tips from Iraqis who agreed to help the Americans-often in exchange for money-these intelligence sources allowed U.S. forces to locate, track and kill their adversaries more precisely. This intelligence surge helped turn the tide of the war, former officials say, more than an increase in the number of troops.

One of the beneficiaries of this rich harvest was Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who ran the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq. JSOC scored some of the most important kills of the war. Working off prized "actionable" intelligence from Washington, as well as assets on the battlefield, McChrystal could marry boots on the ground with electronic data and produce dramatic results.

But this strategy is unlikely to work in Afghanistan, where McChrystal now leads all U.S. forces. It is a country without a digital infrastructure to tap into, and one where enemy forces are more likely to communicate by word-of-mouth than by text messaging and e-mailing. President Obama has ordered a troop surge to Afghanistan, but this intelligence surge is going to look much different.

For starters, it will rely largely on human beings-tips, leads and allegiances won from locals on the ground, whose willingness to cooperate depends on whether the Americans can keep them from being killed if they do so. Those social networks have arguably been neglected during the past seven years, when the intel community's focus shifted to the war in Iraq.

The other distinct characteristic of the Afghan surge is a renewed emphasis on finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Recently, McChrystal told Congress that to finally defeat al Qaeda, the United States had to kill or capture the terrorist icon. But, McChrystal cautioned, doing this with his troops and forces in Afghanistan "is outside my mandate." That's because bin Laden is presumed to be holed up in neighboring Pakistan, where the military is not operating-at least not officially.

This puts the task of eliminating bin Laden on the shoulders of the intelligence community. To help do that, the Obama administration has deployed the CIA's aerial drones in record numbers. During his first year in office, Obama has ordered more strikes than his predecessor. The drones search for al Qaeda leaders, as well as key figures in the Pakistani Taliban and other militants. But so far, they haven't found the top target. If only bin Laden started using a cell phone or Gmail.

The Afghan intelligence surge could fundamentally turn the tables on U.S. spies. For a generation, their technological edge has been their great strength. In Iraq, a mostly flat, interconnected and increasingly wired country, those tools accrued great benefits. But Afghanistan, with its mountainous, tribal terrain and practically medieval infrastructure, will frustrate that 21st century spy craft. To win, the intelligence community will have to play a more old-fashioned game-on the ground, in the dirt and hand to hand.

Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, and a correspondent for National Journal.

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ANALYSIS:Intelligence File Privacy’s Long Shadow

Shane Harris — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Intelligence agencies face a skeptical public as they carry out a vital mission.

On Oct. 23, 2009, Glenn Gaffney, the senior U.S. official responsible for collecting intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, joined Utah Gov. Gary Herbert at a news conference in Salt Lake City. Together, they announced the construction of a new intelligence data center at Camp Williams, a National Guard site south of the capital.

The center has an important mission-providing foreign intelligence about cyber threats, as well as support to military networks and the Homeland Security Department, which is in charge of securing civilian agencies' networks. The National Security Agency will be the executive agent for the new site, which Herbert called a "godsend" in troubled economic times. Construction is estimated to cost $1.5 billion, and the center could employ up to 5,000 people throughout the state. "This is a win-win. This is good for the federal government; this is really good for Utah," he said.

But some Utah citizens aren't convinced. They recall that not so long ago, NSA was secretly sucking up the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who were believed to be in contact with terrorist suspects abroad. Now the agency plans to use the same kinds of surveillance tools to patrol the Internet for hackers and foreign cyber warriors.

"In a quest for safety from potential unemployment and economic hardship, principles (and liberty) are thrown to the wind," Connor Boyack, a Web developer and blogger in Lehi, Utah, wrote in an op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune. Boyack tossed NSA in with some ugly company. "Would Utahns praise an industrial meth lab, prostitution ring or child labor camp simply because they created jobs? Surely not."

Comments on his blog reflected a broad mistrust of the intelligence community. "Our government must end the Bush administration's de facto suspension of the Constitution," wrote one commenter, echoing the fact that the Obama administration has embraced its predecessor's surveillance policies. Boyack noted, "The existence of such facilities infringes (potentially and realistically) on the civil rights of all Americans. So while I don't want it in my backyard, I likewise don't want it anywhere."

To be sure, Boyack's vehement opposition probably attracted similarly outraged citizens to post comments. And there were some supportive remarks on the blog and on the newspaper's Web site. But the theme of the opposition remained consistent, and pointed up a fundamental dilemma NSA and all agencies with a role in the crucial mission of cybersecurity face.

Technology has given the government extraordinary power to collect information, analyze it and share it. But the law governs mostly the acquisition of personal data, not what agencies actually do with it. This is why some Utah residents, and many Americans, are so concerned. They know that somehow the government can grab their e-mails and phone calls. What they don't really know is what agencies do with that information in those big data centers.

The answer isn't encouraging. While government has spent billions of dollars on systems to process vast amounts of data, agencies like NSA are not very good at anticipating threats and protecting Americans' privacy. That is no easy task. But the government hasn't made a strong and concerted effort to accomplish it. Until NSA and all intelligence agencies demonstrate they are committed to balancing the equation, and with more than just public reassurances, the long shadow of privacy will hang over everything they do.

Shane Harris' first book, The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, will be published in February by The Penguin Press. He is a correspondent for National Journal.

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Creaky Collaboration

Shane Harris — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A minor rebellion broke out in the intelligence community a few months ago when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced it was shutting down a popular e-mail system. Called uGov, it allowed employees of different agencies to share information securely with each other, often without revealing operational details such as which agency they worked for or where they were located.

uGov looked like a prime example of the innovation that many intelligence reformists, as well as the 9/11 commission, had demanded in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. It allowed people separated by barriers of secrecy to work together, even if on a limited basis. And judging by the outraged response that news of its demise drew, the sharing system apparently had taken hold.

Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, a sister publication of Government Executive, broke the news of the shutdown, and it set off a flood of e-mails to the DNI's office. Aggrieved employees actually set up a protest wiki to save uGov. "I can't imagine doing my job as effectively without it," Ambinder quoted one DNI employee saying. A Navy officer reported that following a "catastrophic loss of communications [in Europe], decision-makers were kept in the loop only because we could access ugov.gov accounts from mobile devices and send updates and pictures." A CIA analyst claimed the system offered the only way to provide state and local law enforcement officials with homeland security information. And on and on.

Officials cited undefined security concerns as the impetus for terminating the system. This has always been the Achilles' heel of any open platform that allows employees with unequal access to secrets to communicate with each other. But outraged analysts questioned whether their leaders also would take the ax to other popular collaboration tools, like the wiki Intellipedia. Officials tried to assure them those tools were safe.

The protests, as well as Ambinder's dogged coverage of them, might have convinced intelligence leaders to alter their course. The ODNI has promised to hold off on ending uGov for some months and to assess the effects of shutting it down. And a letter to employees insisted the office "remains committed" to providing technology services across the intelligence community.

Yet one has to wonder how solid those assurances really are. For one thing, the very rebellion that the threat to uGov touched off likely affirms the initial fears some officials had about it. From the perspective of a security officer, whose sole mission is to ensure an agency's secret business stays that way, the employees who adore uGov are the ones who have no qualms about airing their agency's dirty laundry in public. Some aggrieved employees actually posted their remarks on Twitter for anyone to see.

Of course, had the protests never occurred, it's likely that uGov's opponents would have succeeded in killing it. No one has claimed that the system led to any security breaches, or that it threatened an agency's turf. So, it is tempting to conclude that skeptical officials were slaves to a kind of parochial thinking that a significant portion of the intelligence community finds antithetical to the way they work.

These might be irreconcilable differences. Security always has been the bane of innovation. The question long facing the DNI has been whether to come down on the side of openness and to accrue all the benefits it can bring, or to stick with a closed and arguably safer model, which also has proved to increase the chances of a major intelligence failure. The fight over uGov speaks to a still deep-seated conflict over this fundamental problem. And it doesn't bode well for the future of collaboration.

Shane Harris writes about intelligence for National Journal. His first book, The Watchers, will be published in February.

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