| Summary/Abstract |
Intelligence has been historically seen as a national-level function, carried out primarily by the federal government. Although local law enforcement agencies have often conducted intelligence activities, these have usually focused on criminal prosecution, leaving to the national level the task of using intelligence to proactively counter national security threats. The U.S. Intelligence Community, for an example, is an exclusively federal-level entity, and the literature on American intelligence tends to focus on national-level organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.1 Since the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks, however, there has been significant effort in the United States to share intelligence with state and local officials, and to a lesser extent, to create new local intelligence structures and organizations. This has resulted in what might be called the “localization of intelligence,”2 and although civil liberties advocates worry about the possible erosion of liberty and privacy that such efforts may produce, many scholars and law enforcement experts argue that this increased focus on local intelligence has been a positive development. Little research has been done, however, to examine the results of such local intelligence programs.
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