The specific concern in the infamous debate over the Iraqi “WMD that weren't” was politicization – the risk that intelligence would be under pressure, usually more implicit than explicit, to produce assessments that suited the preferences of national administrations. Yet, too often in my experience, politicization was avoided at the cost of irrelevance – those interesting but not useful analyses that answered questions no one was asking. Analysts in the intelligence “tribe” could avoid politicization from their counterparts in the policy tribe by remaining aloof from them.

Thinking about the future of analysis requires considering from whence the pressures toward politicization will arise and perhaps rethinking the ways to protect against it without condemning analysis to irrelevance. In that future, the principal danger may be more subtle than overt politicization. It may be the temptation – seen in what has become the almost regular declassifying of NIEs – of administrations and their leaders to use intelligence to justify their policies, which puts intelligence in an unwanted and exposed public position.

The federal agencies call reaching out to the vastly expanded tribe of consumers – those 700,000 law enforcement officers in eighteen thousand government jurisdictions, plus the private-sector managers of “public” infrastructure – information-sharing. That is precisely what it is not. First, the language implies that agencies own their information, sharing it only as they see fit; in that sense, the language only reinforces the existing stovepipes.