What is the mission of our established intelligence branches?

NSA—The National Security Agency’s original mission was to conduct surveillance on subjects located outside the United States.  Surveillance of the United States citizens within the United States was prohibited.  This got all messed up after 9/11 and somehow we got to the point where all the country’s electronic communications were being collected and stored.  This invasion of privacy was a stupid mistake by less than smart politicians.  The government will never convince me that this data collection is lawful without a specific court order.

CIA—The Central Intelligence Agency is a super secret intelligence gathering agency whose mission was to collect and store intelligence on foreign countries and populace.  That mission should not include domestic surveillance, but does it now?  Who can trust the federal government?

Leave those agencies and their original missions alone.  We don’t need a SNAFU here.

The collection of meta data by NSA would be a joke if it were not so serious.  My contention is that there are no programmers or group of programmers with super computers who are smart enough to collect billions of meta data points a day, analyze and report on them quickly enough to prevent a terrorist event.  With all due respect, if they could do that, why have the government’s computers been hacked so frequently?  It appears that the IT techies don’t know how to make our computers safe.  If they do, why haven’t there been any notifications by the tech giants informing the government that a specific terrorist attack is soon to take place.  These giants love to collect and use our personal data without our permission using the protection of our constitution, but what are they doing to keep us safe?  Don’t they live in this country and have an obligation to report suspicious activity when discovered?  It does appear that there is absolutely too much reliance on processing electronic data?

As was mentioned after 9/11, we need more and better human intelligence—not data points.  The FBI ignored human intelligence from Russia and we had the Boston bombing.  Stupid political correctness became political censorship and authorities were not notified of unusual behavior in San Bernardino, so 14 people were murdered.  The human intelligence was there but not acted upon.

What do we do?

First, we ask all citizens to report any and all suspicious activity they observe to the local police.  The suspicious activity reported must be confidential and remain confidential so that there can be no retribution or stupid lawsuit.  The local police will have to decide whether or not the information received needs to be investigated.

Secondly, the FBI is an after the occurrence crime investigative organization.  While the FBI may already collect terrorist data, clearly it is insufficient, so a new branch devoted solely to the detection and tracking of terrorism is needed.  These new terrorist branch agents would report to the FBI Director.  Furthermore, the FBI must be independent and removed from the Department of Injustice—whoops Justice.  The mission of this new branch will be to collect, organize and support federal, state and local police investigating any terrorist activity.  When any human intelligence is reported and investigated, this information should be reported to this new FBI terrorist branch so it can be cataloged in a national terrorist database.

This confidential data base with proper security access must be available only to one or two members of every police department 24/7/365.  If all police officers can access this database there will likely be abuse, so restricted access quickly determines who has abused the system.  It should be recognized that while the local police are responsible for “normal law and order”, terrorists do not believe in law and order.  Let us get serious about national security and leave the dirty political games in the garbage.

While this data collection may already being done by the FBI today, it is painfully evident that it is insufficient and must be expanded.  The real purpose of this new FBI database and terror branch is to assist the thousands of police officers who are on the front lines of enforcement.  Good local police enforcement serves the public best when they assist the federal government in keeping us safe.