Intelligence Oversight is a program that is absolutely necessary to the intelligence community because it allows congress the ability to oversee intelligence-related activities while also controlling the flow of intelligence to ensure classified or sensitive information is not made available to the public or adversaries. There is a fine line between the need for sharing intelligence in regards to national security and protecting the public, and sharing intelligence on a need-to-know basis. Public exposure to any sensitive operations could have a major effect on the outcome and therefore all IC activities should be monitored closely. (Riley 2010)
The intelligence oversight program is actually very broad in terms of what the program accomplishes and has changed drastically from the 1940’s until now. After several hiccups along the way, the Intelligence Oversight Act was actually passed in 1980 which put many constraints on the intelligence community, requiring them to pass along information on all operations. (Riley 2010) Giving congress this high level of access to intelligence operations has its ups and downs, but overall, I think that intelligence oversight has a lot of value and there is nothing that I would currently change. I think believe that it is very important to have a central authority in order to keep things organized and running smoothly. Like any organization, intelligence community should also be under a high level of surveillance in order to protect sensitive information, share information to the appropriate agencies and be able to maximize their resources. It took many intelligence mistakes over time to come up with these laws and regulations and it will likely continue to change as needed as more incidences take place. After going through the majority of this class, If I had to add one thing to intelligence oversight, I would suggest that law enforcement officers (with a given security clearance of course) be included in the need to know category with the intelligence community. It is coming down to our biggest threat being insider threats and homegrown terrorists, and I think that adding these officers in the loop would only add additional value and knowledge to any case.
Riley, J. & Schneider, M.K. (2010). Congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence. In Homeland security and intelligence, edited by Logan, K. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International. Retrieved from
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