Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
This book takes up where Gregory F. Treverton's previous Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information (2001) left off. It provides an opportunity for the author to discuss the consequences of the greater public importance enjoyed by intelligence and his belief that the shift to terrorism and other transnational threats as the preeminent targets runs deeper than is realized (p. vii). The book begins with a description of where intelligence was during the Cold War period, but "its purpose is to describe where intelligence needs to go" (p. 1). The main themes are the change in the nature of the risk (suicide bombers cannot be deterred as states could), the great expansion in the number of consumers of intelligence in both the public and private sectors, and the problem of "boundaries" between law and intelligence, home and abroad, public and private.
The change in targets for intelligence is "dramatic," if "hardly absolute" (p. 15). Whereas most of Cold War intelligence was puzzle-solving when uncertainty was the product of secrecy, now much more is concerned with mysteries. Even intelligence about contemporary states involves more mystery, but it is nonstate targets that pose the real problem. Organized crime and drug trafficking are not new, but the primary significance of "terrorism" is. For this, the United States has no "story"--where the terrorists are, how they are organized, and so on. The author sees the new complexities as "mysteries-plus" (p. 33) and, given both the increased uncertainty and need for prevention, intelligence becomes more significant in developing policy. Treverton describes a spectrum of threats, from those "with threateners" to those without (e.g., pestilence), and he notes the problem of knowing whether some things derive from human action or not. It would be useful to consider further the implications of risk analysis for intelligence (cf. Paul Bracken, Ian Bremmer and David Gordon, eds.,