Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform

by Richard A. Posner

Ever since the publication in 2004 of the 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. intelligence community has been in the throes of a convulsive movement for reform. In Preventing Surprise Attacks (2005), Richard A. Posner carried the story of the reform movement up to the enactment of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which produced a defective plan for reorganizing the intelligence system, partly as result of the failure of the 9/11 Commission and Congress to bring historical, comparative, and scholarly perspectives to bear issues. At that time, however, the new structure had not yet been built. Posner's new book brings the story up to date. He argues that the decisions about structure that the Administration has made in implementation of the Act are creating too top-heavy, too centralized, an intelligence system. The book

* exposes fallacies in criticisms of the performance of the U.S. intelligence services;
* analyzes structures and priorities for directing and coordinating U.S. intelligence in the era of global terrorism;
* presents new evidence for the need to create a domestic intelligence agency separate from the FBI, and a detailed blueprint for such an agency;
* incorporates a wealth of material based on developments since the first book, including the report of the presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina;
* exposes the inadequacy of the national security computer networks;
* critically examines Congress's performance in the intelligence field, and raises constitutional issues concerning the respective powers of Congress and the President;
* emphasizes the importance of reforms that do not require questionable organizational changes.

The book is published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2006

About the author

Richard Posner is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, where he presided until his retirement on September 2, 2017. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.

Judge Posner has written a number of books, including Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), The Economics of Justice (1981), Law and Literature (3rd ed. 2009), The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (1990), The Essential Holmes (1992), Sex and Reason (1992), Overcoming Law (1995), The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (1996), Law and Legal Theory in England and America (1996), The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (1999), Antitrust Law (2d ed. 2001), Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (2005), How Judges Think (2008), and A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (2009), as well as books on the Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore, and many articles in legal and economic journals and book reviews in the popular press. He has taught administrative law, antitrust, economic analysis of law, history of legal thought, conflict of laws, regulated industries, law and literature, the legislative process, family law, primitive law, torts, civil procedure, evidence, health law and economics, law and science, and jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he was the President of the American Law and Economics Association from 1995 to 1996 and the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. He has received a number of awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia in 1994, the Marshall-Wythe Medallion from the College of William and Mary in 1998, the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, also in 2003 the John Sherman Award from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Learned Hand Medal for Exellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal bar Council in 2005, and, also in 2005, the Thomas C. Schelling Award from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Tim Lundquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid review of "intelligence reform." Posner makes a convincing case that most politicians and media actors fail to understand what intelligence can, and cannot do.