Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program , and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI . He has written three books, Restraint-A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine. The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and most recently Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program , and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI . He has written three books, Restraint-A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine. The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and most recently Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

Brian Posen: It is an unclassified number—and has been for several years—what the United States spends on intelligence every year. It’s an unclassified number. They don’t really break out what they’re spending it on, they break it out only in terms of two categories: general intelligence and military intelligence. And the totals for many years now have been around $70 billion. Seven-zero billion dollars. $70 billion. About 20 billion for military, which helps you fight, about 50 billion, “just because”, to surveil the world.

Now I have to say, I’m skeptical that we need to spend $70 billion on intelligence. I’m skeptical about what some of this intelligence is buying and doing. I’m skeptical.

Intelligence in general is what you need for defense or offense; you need it for restraint, you need it for hegemony. Intelligence you need to run a great power strategy. But I’d like to unpack what it is that we’re doing a little bit better, and look at some of these activities and ask, “Is this really necessary?”

Because my impression is we pretty much spy on everything given the chance: friends, enemies, whomever. During the peak of our 9/11 anger and hurt we spied on ourselves. And we spied on ourselves without really sorting out the legal ramifications of it. We collected vast amounts of metadata, stored it. This is spying on Americans! We’re doing a little bit less of it now, but it’s not very hard for an American who has friends abroad to get caught up in surveillance. There’s just a lot of collection, a lot of collection.

And a lot of this information is stored so that if something happens, the IC, using fancy algorithms, can backtrack communications among individuals to figure out who was implicated and who knew who. If you have the big library and you have the guilty party, you can then reverse engineer to try to figure out who else was implicated. It doesn’t prevent the terrorist attack, but it does allow you to prosecute the group.

But all the rest of us end up compromising our privacy for this purpose, and this is another thing where we should have a conversation. And it’s not an easy and straightforward conversation, because some people would privilege safety and say, “Fine, they can have that metadata on me, the traffic, the numbers I called. As long as they’re not collecting the text of my phone calls they can collect the origins of my phone calls and emails, keep them in a library, anonymized until they need to de-anonymize them.”

Some people say, fine, if that’s what we need to be able to backtrack a terrorist event and break up a network, they’re fine with that. I’m a little uncomfortable with it, I have to say. But I don’t think it’s an open and shut, straightforward matter, I think these things about the magnitude of the American intelligence effort worldwide, what that effort is focusing on, how much information it ends up collecting at home—this is something that really needs to be discussed, because I think it has something to do with American liberties.

And this is not particularly what I spend my days doing, but I do feel uneasy about it, and I do tend to believe that the more active we are in international politics, the more this machine grinds on, the more we collect abroad, the more we’re going to collect at home, and the bigger the kind of amorphous mass of information waiting to be misused by someone is, and that’s the thing that kind of concerns me.