ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, the intelligence value of the domestic environment has not been optimally realized. The term “domestic intelligence” has been an incendiary within the context of American politics. However, “domestic intelligence” is a wildly inaccurate characterization of what the agencies responsible for operating within U.S. borders are doing. Rather than focusing intelligence activities against domestic targets, in the fashion of some Orwellian dystopia, federal and sub-federal agencies are identifying intelligence information that happens to be resident within the domestic environment. Unfortunately, the charged terminology has confounded an open, ongoing, and responsible dialogue about how agencies tasked with
intelligence functions develop and deploy capabilities. The concern, paradoxically, is that the more histrionic discussion becomes, any time “intelligence” and “domestic” appear in the same sentence, the less likely that effective, objective oversight can occur. Less oversight does not equate with overreach. Rather, it is far more likely to result in failures because of an inability to assess the redundancies and gaps in the de facto domestically oriented intelligence enterprise, which has emerged piecemeal during the past century.
