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Essay On Hsep 320 Intelligence And Committee Process

2799 Words12 Pages

Final

Richard Stith
Virginia Commonwealth Univsrsity
HSEP: 320 Intelligence and Committee Process
Larry Prokop
May 3, 2023

When it comes to intelligence within the intelligence community (IC), it's important to understand how intelligence is a specialized form of information there has been reviewed by analysts to extract key details. Intelligence is crucial to how a nation protects itself and can be obtained through spying and espionage, hacking into a target's network, or any other data collection tactics. Intelligence can help provide insight and warn of potential threats, assess likely outcomes of the proposed policy and law options, build profiles on leaders, inform our intelligence agencies of security threats, and help in …show more content…

, 2009). Oversight is generally seen in two categories where the National Security oversees and creates policy for the intelligence community, and the oversight done by Congress controls their budget. Oversight within the intelligence community is essential due to the critical importance of the nation’s security and to make sure no agency abuses its power. The events of 9/11 and the “war on terror” have made a major impact on our national security perspectives and have transformed the activities of government programs in the post-Cold War era. Nowadays, nations are required to have robust intelligence agencies and the capability to ward off global terrorism, but it calls into question how far society should extend the mandate of unrestricted power to the intelligence sector in a democratic, free state (Baldino, 2010). How worried should individuals be that vague threats of terrorism will not be used as a faint to erode institutions and their core values? In search to balance national security with a free democracy, oversight of the intelligence sector is needed and should be used to coordinate and maintain a solid, protected state. On the other hand, one large ethical issue that …show more content…

This is why oversight within the intelligence agency is so important: although oversight in congressional terms is used for governing the intelligence community and setting budget plans, oversight in the intelligence community is used to make sure no agency abuses its power as the turn of the 21st century began with the War on Terror increased surveillance on citizens. The example used earlier for moral and ethical issues in intelligence was the examination of Soviet era maskirovka a which was defined as Russian military deception tactics during World War Two in the Cold War. Dressing in Afghan army uniforms for surprise attacks and wearing white uniforms to camouflage in the snow were all moral and ethical issues that resembled guerrilla tactics that are often shunned in war. This is directly related to the legitimacy of covert actions since they were primarily used during the Cold War by the United States to overthrow communist and left-leaning governments to stop the spread of communism. However, after that era passed and public media became popular through technology, covert actions, and spies are at extreme risk if agencies ever use human intelligence. Lastly, moral and ethical issues were seen in the Five Eyes Nation alliance when Edward

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