The President as Intelligence Overseer
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Description
Intelligence oversight typically describes a set of processes and institutions designed to deter and detect illegality and abuse. This chapter focuses on another sense of intelligence oversight, distinguished by its concern with promoting effective intelligence collection while seeking to minimize a wide range of costs, including diplomatic blowback, economic harm to American firms, and intrusiveness that threatens privacy rights. It argues that the institution that has begun to furnish this more holistic sort of oversight, and that enjoys conspicuous advantages over preexisting bodies in doing so, is the president, aided by his staff (especially the NSC). This chapter offers a descriptive account of the rise of presidential intelligence (emphasizing the roles of technology firms and American allies), a qualified normative defense of its value (in addition to, rather than instead of, existing oversight bodies), and a set of prescriptions for how to design institutions to realize its full potential.
Source Publication
Global Intelligence Oversight: Governing Security in the Twenty-First Century
Source Editors/Authors
Zachary K. Goldman, Samuel J. Rascoff
Publication Date
2016
Recommended Citation
Rascoff, Samuel J., "The President as Intelligence Overseer" (2016). Faculty Chapters. 1945.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1945
