The U.S. intelligence community may well need big structural fixes, but more modest measures could dramatically improve its performance. Here's what reformers are pushing:
Make collaboration Job 1
Reward and promote employees based on collaborative projects. Implement joint training and rotations of key personnel—both within and among intelligence agencies.
Get analysts closer to collectors
Analysts ought to know what kind of intelligence they're getting and from whom. One big help: Implement ICMAP, a computer program that tracks requests for data.
Improve oversight
Congress needs to get serious. Start by insisting that its investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, get access to the CIA; it's been shut out since the early 1960s.
Standardize clearances
Create a standardized security clearance for the intelligence community, so that personnel don't have to be cleared again and again.
Open the system
In a networked world, U.S. intelligence needs to interact more with the outside world: academia, business, policymakers.
Expand use of open sources
U.S. intelligence spends only .5 percent of its budget on mining open sources—news reports, public records, the Internet. There's gold worth mining.
Reduce secrecy
Stop overclassifying. Identify what really needs to be kept secret, and then start declassifying the rest.
Increase competitive intelligence
Make greater use of peer review and establish special units, known in the trade as "red teams," to ensure other points of view are considered.
Get networked
Sharply broaden access across agencies to E-mail and databases, and ensure that U.S. intelligence has state-of-the-art tools for online collaboration.
Tame the security police
The world may be networked, but intelligence pros can't bring most Palms, BlackBerrys, or laptops to work. Sure, guard the secrets, but join the 21st century.
