Accountability and America's Secret Foreign Policy: Keeping a Legislative Eye on the Central Intelligence Agency

Intelligence accountability ("oversight") encompasses the supervision of a vast range of secret activities and 15 major agencies. Oversight since 1975 has been robust compared to earlier years; yet it continues to fall short of goals espoused by the Church Committee that year, as well as by subsequent panels advocating intelligence reform. Lawmakers have responded responsibly to intelligence surprises ("fire alarms"), carrying out probes into domestic spying, assassination plots, and other questionable covert actions, counterintelligence vulnerabilities, and major intelligence failures. They have paid less attention, though, to the day-to-day "police-patrolling" that might uncover weaknesses and eliminate the need for emergency firefighting. Individual members in both branches of Congress have displayed a significant commitment to oversight activities, and now and then the full oversight committees have worked energetically as a unit. Mostly, however, intelligence accountability since 1975 has been a story of discontinuous motivation, ad hoc responses to scandals, and reliance on the initiative of just a few members of Congress—mainly the occasional dedicated committee chair—to carry the burden. Despite the recommendations of several scholarly studies and government reports, absent still is a comprehensive approach to intelligence review that mobilizes most, if not all, of the members of the House and Senate standing committees on intelligence toward a systematic plan of police-patrolling, without waiting for fire alarms.     

Violent victimization among males and economic conditions

Research Summary In this article, we use data from the 1973 to 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to estimate previously unknown trends in serious nonfatal violent victimization for Latino, non-Latino Black, and non-Latino White males in the United States. Past research has shown that Blacks and Latinos have been more susceptible than Whites to financial hardship during economic downturns and that economic disadvantage is an important correlate of violence in cross-sectional analyses. If significant declines in the national economy contribute to increases in violence, then crime trends disaggregated by race and ethnicity should show greater changes among minorities during periods of economic downturn. Although rates of violence have declined for all groups, we find that trends for Latino and Black males are similar and closely follow changes in consumer sentiment. In contrast, trends for White males display fewer fluctuations coinciding with changes in economic conditions. Continued disaggregation shows that these patterns appear primarily in stranger violence and not in violence by known offenders. The patterns also suggest that the association between changing economic conditions and male victimization trends might have weakened in recent years. Policy Implications The findings raise concerns about the potential impact of recent economic changes on the risk for serious victimization, particularly among Blacks and Latinos. In light of the possible recent weakening of the relationship between economic changes and crime, future research should assess whether criminal justice policies and other factors moderate the relationship between economic conditions and victimization and use group-specific measures of violence so that important variability across race and ethnicity is not masked. These analyses also should be expanded to consider the potential effects on violence of government policies designed to alleviate poverty and unemployment.