Intelligence experts pan call for domestic spying agency
A new domestic spying agency would neither serve the interests of police or spying agencies nor ameliorate Americans' fears about enhanced electronic surveillance by the government, a panel of intelligence experts largely agreed, for different reasons, on Friday.
The proposal, reportedly discussed in the White House, is one of the recommendations of the Gilmore Commission, an advisory panel on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The issue gained renewed attention with a Nov. 18 decision of a secret court that expanded the government's authority to use intelligence information in criminal prosecutions.
Attorney General John Ashcroft praised the decision, but civil liberties advocates said it represented a new avenue for spying on Americans.
"One of the reasons for their recommendation that there should be a separate agency for intelligence in the U.S. is that they thought separating intelligence from law enforcement authority would enhance civil liberties protection," said Suzanne Spaulding, head of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
"We are very concerned about the proposals for a new domestic intelligence authority," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, which favors greater oversight of and the ability to check the abuses of intelligence-gathering agencies.
Two major problems for intelligence agencies are facilitating the CIA's ability to give international intelligence to the FBI's intelligence division, and to make the transition between intelligence and law enforcement officials in the United States, she said.
Because the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies are geared toward providing national security information for the president and other policymakers, its operations have not been geared toward prosecuting crimes, a key mission of the FBI. Britain, on the other hand, has not only the FBI-equivalent Scotland Yard and CIA-equivalent MI6, but also MI5, a domestic spying agency that has no equivalent in the United States.
"A new domestic intelligence agency doesn't seem to us to address those problems," Martin continued, saying that her greatest worry is that "intelligence has to operate in near-total secrecy," something that she said is not appropriate for dealing with individuals apprehended in the United States. Instead, she suggested a separate division within the FBI.
"The simple fact is that you have to be able to use all the tools available," whether they originate with intelligence or law enforcement officials, said FBI Deputy General Counsel M.E. (Spike) Bowman. He took umbrage with the view that the "FBI has always been about prosecution and never about prevention."
"I tend to look at the MI5 argument as a 'grass is always greener'" view, Bowman said, arguing that British intelligence officials are rapidly abandoning such compartmentalization.
"With regard to a proposal for a domestic surveillance agency like MI5, you have to put me down against it," former CIA Inspector General Britt Snider added. "I'm not sure I would feel that way if we were starting from scratch, but I cannot see another infrastructure in the U.S. for this purpose" besides the FBI.