Latest in Intelligence Oversight
This year will likely see Congress continuing to write Public Law provisions creating secret law at an historically high tempo.
Years ago, when Lawfare was still in its infancy, the two of us made an entirely serious video (well, maybe not entirely serious) for YouTube about the emergent problem of abusive internet comments. Entitled "Comment or Vote," it proposed a constitutional amendment to deprive of the franchise anyone who left a comment on any website.
Those following the Section 702 reauthorization debate may be interested in Germany’s recent intelligence reforms.
The New York Times has published a declassified version of a 2016 report from the Defense Department Inspector General that assesses the reforms implemented to improve security of the NSA's most sensitive systems after the Snowden disclosures.
On November 30th, the House passed H.R. 6393, the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY'17. While it remains to be seen what if anything ultimately emerges at the end of the process, I'd like to highlight some items in the current bill that I found particularly interesting:
- two involve attempts to give SSCI and HPSCI greater awareness of presidential policy directives and MOUs involving the IC;
Today, the Department of Defense released revised procedures governing the conduct of its intelligence activities. Lawfare has a rundown of exactly what's new and what it means for DoD intelligence collection moving forward.
Despite the substantial overlap between counterterrorism activities undertaken by the CIA and JSOC, we tend to pay a lot more attention to the details of the congressional oversight framework for the former as compared to the latter. The NDAA often addresses CT oversight relating to DOD activities, however, and this year is no exception. What follows below is an attempt to provide a user-friendly guide to the proposals on the table.
I. Increasing the pace of quarterly operational briefings regarding CT:
Most citizens assume that all of the law Congress writes is public. That is not, in fact, true. Our general norm of publishing law has a significant and largely overlooked legislative exception: classified addenda associated with three annual national security acts.
This week on the show, Zachary Goldman and Samuel Rascoff of the NYU Center on Law and Security come on the show to discuss their new edited volume, Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twentry-First Century.
On one the hand, it was always clear that the Germans actively aided U.S. intelligence-gathering and hungrily consumed its results. On the other hand, the German intelligence services face nothing like the control and oversight under which the American intelligence community labors.