Reservations--
On the one hand, our intelligence community HAS gotten terribly, terribly out of control, and DOES NOT serve the PUBLIC interest.
They absolutely do serve the public interest, they guard your state from Russians and Chinese who aim to install tyranny in your country, that alone is a good enough reason to put your trust into them.
If you ask me, here is the short list of things that need to happen:
1) No, IC, you DO NOT get to create PsyOps and propaganda for use on the CITIZENS of the US. I dont care what our dumbshit congress did a few years back, that needs to go away.
Domestic propaganda is a
necessary component of intelligence warfare against enemies as devious as Russians. Just look at what the lack of proper media control has done - it magnified the lies raised against the properly qualified candidate, Hillary Clinton, a thousand-times fold and made her seen as "equal", if not somehow worse, than a shady billionaire. Oh, and said "shady billionaire" has been presented as "the worker's candidate" by the same media liars - and this blatant lie has worked, fooling the poor and uneducated people who simply don't have enough free time or attention to discern them, because the IC hasn't been allowed to prevent it from spreading.
2) No, IC, you DO NOT get to use secret court rulings, with secret courts, that use secret laws, to justify your operations. Public courts with sealed documents are adequate, and have been adequate for decades.
That implies that you don't trust the IC on their word. It's kind of impossible to have anything like IC without you having to believe them on their word - they can't operate without secrecy.
I mean, you could use other agencies to try and keep them in check, which is why USA has a good 17 of them - but by their own nature, public has - and should not really have, outside of national election process - no influence, control or oversight over IC.
3) No, IC, you DO NOT get to get around restrictions on spying on citizens by employing foreign intelligence services, and NO, IC, you DO NOT get to trade favors with those agencies with the intel you collected on foreign citizens.
Domestic intelligence is perhaps the most important component of intelligence, as this election has shown us. Without the IC "getting around" the restrictions, USA would still be in the dark towards Trump being in Putin's pocket - because said information came from a
British ex-agent.
4) No, IC, you do not get to "just sit" on security vulnerabilities you happen to find, as "tactical resources". If you find a security hole in US infrastructure that puts US Citizens at risk by foreign agencies, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE IT, SO AS TO PROTECT AMERICAN CITIZENS.
Cyberwarfare is essentially impossible without exploiting "security vulnerabilities". You seem to be asking for IC to secede all offensive cyber-capabilities, and that's pretty unacceptable.
That is because flagrant bias is considered "intellectualism" today.
I would welcome an honest, and upfront speaker from the DPRK--- Why not get it straight from the horse's mouth? I wouldn't agree with much they had to speak on, but I would welcome the speaker, and encourage attendance of the speech all the same.
These days? "Oh, that's THOSE people! I dont want them in MY campus, no matter how valuable hearing outside views is to having a well rounded world view!"
It used to be, kids were taught the value of being exposed to outside ideas, even if you did not agree with them-- These days, kids seem to be getting taught that outside ideas are wrong, and dangerous, and to be feared-- things that you need to crawl into a safe-space over.
They're not 100% wrong about that. Outside ideas
are usually wrong, dangerous, and to be feared - just look at modern Republicanism to see the most blatant example of said "outside idea" ravaging an entire country. Same about that DPRK speaker example - communism is a very insidious ideology that has ruined many, many countries, limiting its spread is usually good for you.
I think that our society need to extend the concept of "unqualified to do *something*" further. There are clearly many ideas which require special kind of education/training in order to fully understand them and their consequences and to avoid being subverted by their manipulative components. Unrestricted access of the population to said ideas is slowly, but surely, killing the world - quite literally, in case of climate change denial.
It is commonly thought that if we allow all ideas to spread equally unchecked, something like an idealistic "free market" of ideas, it would elevate the good ones higher, and the bad ones into the dustbin of history. But it has been clearly and obviously proven false by now. The bad ideas refuse to die off, and more than that - they seem to be slowly gaining ground over the good ones through sheer mass repetition and their relative effortless-ness.
A free unregulated market of ideas, just like a free unregulated market of economy, is a
failure.
Now, there are many examples in history of attempts to regulate ideas that ended in failure and/or authoritarianism, too. But that doesn't mean that any possible regulation of ideas is bad. Command economy is bad - but proper regulations are important for modern economy to function without blowing up in a firework of monopolies and unpaid debt. There must be a solution that fully keeps the authoritarianism and dogmatism away, or at least does it more effectively than a pure free market of ideas does. And it must be found and implemented, in order to create a truly stable liberal society resistant to manipulative influences both foreign and domestic.