Modern intelligence power

It may be helpful to summarize here the main conclusions about the institutions, activity and output of the government intelligence model examined here: the UK–US (and Commonwealth) community, which also illuminates many features of Western intelligence and some aspects of modern intelligence power everywhere. The system Intelligence developed slowly as a permanent institution from the midnineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War, with more rapid growth thereafter, culminating in the satellite surveillance and increased power of electronic collection in the last quarter-century. This development has been matched by the growth of other organized government knowledge, such as government statistics and law enforcement intelligence. Like these other institutions, the government intelligence discussed here is a system of organized information-gathering, analysis and forecasting; like them, it serves government's executive functions but with an all-important institutional separation from policy-making and decision-taking. Thus peacetime intelligence is separate from diplomacy; similarly wartime intelligence is organizationally distinct from Electronic Warfare and other ‘combat information’ collected and used as integral parts of military operations. Intelligence's broad subjects are foreign targets of all kinds and internal security threats (including terrorism), with much overlap between the two. In resource terms ‘foreign intelligence’ on the first group of targets is considerably larger than ‘security intelligence’ on the second. Within intelligence as a whole there are two other, separable components. The first is information collection, operating without its targets’ cooperation or knowledge, usually by special means designed to penetrate secrecy. It is expert on particular techniques.