Global Security and Intelligence Recommendations

"All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO...

Researchers in the rapidly growing field of intelligence studies face unique and difficult challenges ranging from finding and accessing data on secret activities, to sorting through the politics of intelligence successes and failures, to making sense of complex socio-organizational or psychological phenomena. The contributing authors to Researching National Security Intelligence survey the state of the field and demonstrate how incorporating multiple...

Collecting and analyzing intelligence are essential to national security and an effective foreign policy. The public also looks to its security agencies for protection from terrorism, from serious criminality, and to be safe in using cyberspace. But intelligence activities pose inherent dilemmas for democratic societies. How far should the government be allowed to go in collecting and using intelligence before it jeopardizes the freedoms that citizens...

The United States is losing the counterintelligence war. Foreign intelligence services, particularly those of China, Russia, and Cuba, are recruiting spies in our midst and stealing our secrets and cutting-edge technologies. In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its...

"The entire vast, modern American intelligence system--the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes--can be traced back to the dire straits the world faced at the dawn of World War II. Prior to 1940, the United States had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch covert campaigns against enemies overseas and just a few codebreakers, isolated in windowless vaults. It was only through Winston Churchill's determination...

"The United States is at a historical inflection point as leading military powers are increasing the use of remote weapons, broadening the scope of targeted killing operations, and turning to artificial intelligence to control their weapons systems. This book deals with the complexities of the future of war."--