US Intelligence
A country needs intelligence services. What it cannot survive is intelligence services that operate on the electorate rather than for it. This area is about the line between those two things, and about making the line checkable rather than promised.
No removing democracy at home
An election is only real if the people running the machinery of the state accept its result and do not work to shape it in advance. The specific concerns, each of which has to be testable:
- Collection turned on domestic political activity rather than on foreign threats.
- Classification used to decide what voters are permitted to know before voting.
- Investigative authority applied on a schedule that tracks an election calendar.
No puppet master over US politics
The sharper version of the same problem: an agency that can determine what a member of Congress knows, and when, holds a lever over the vote that no constituent has. Where control over a decision runs through the information available to the decider, the party controlling the information is a party to the decision. That is the test used throughout Congress Working For Citizens.
The capture record on the agencies
Allegations that an agency has been controlled — or has acted as controller — are treated the same way as everything else on this site: filed as named problems, sourced to the public record, with the missing pieces marked as missing. They live in Problems and can be checked from Open Data.
Whistleblower protection
None of the above is discoverable from outside without people inside who can speak. So protection is not a courtesy here, it is load-bearing:
- An employee must be able to say that something is wrong and make the specifics public, not only report them into the chain that is the subject of the report.
- Protection has to survive the career, not just the news cycle.
- Retaliation has to carry a consequence, or the protection is decorative.
No citizen data handed to foreign countries
Data collected on Americans stays under American law and out of foreign hands. A service that hands citizen data abroad has converted a domestic authority into a foreign one — and the citizen whose data it is never agreed to that. The outbound half of this problem is covered in Foreign Intelligence.
What is not in this area
Foreign services operating on the United States — that is Foreign Intelligence.
Pages in this area
- No removing democracy at home — collection, classification and timing, each stated so it can be tested.
- No puppet master over US politics — controlling the inputs makes you a party to the decision.
- Whistleblowers — the only route by which any of this becomes visible.
Where to go next
- Exposing the Deep State — the area before this one.
- Foreign Intelligence — the area after this one.