The Intelligence Club: A Comparative Look at Five Eyes

The goal of intelligence is to evaluate data and attempt to reduce uncertainty. Successful intelligence practices try to reduce apparent ambiguity through accurate estimates and support the implementation of successful policy. The ability of intelligence communities to react to new threats and adapt and focus on relevant issues quickly and efficiently is essential for modern intelligence.

A greater understanding of what comprises (or what is perceived as) an intelligence failure is important in avoiding methods that don’t work; similarly, having an awareness of other states’ intelligence efforts and observing different (and possibly more successful) approaches can help mitigate sedentary, too-conservative thinking. A group which has been extraordinarily successful, by any subjective or objective standard, has been the Five Eyes. Five Eyes is a surveillance arrangement comprised of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSEC), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). A comparative look at Five Eyes’ intelligence efforts and agencies provides an opportunity to examine what may contribute to common themes of intelligence success.

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Environmental Flows, Political Dams

In 2005, a group of water resource experts issued a statement cajoling decision-makers to privilege the needs of nature in their water management strategies. In effect, their Brisbane Declaration popularized the idea of environmental flows, a concept that focuses attention on the quantity, quality and timing of water required to sustain a dependent ecosystem.

In this essay I ask how well this concept has held up against the political pressures of popularity. To this end, I examine the various meanings inscribed on the concept of environmental flows as it has traveled across time and space. My findings uncover a few observations regarding the need for greater attentiveness to concept management. The findings also reveal a few surprising revelations about the forces at work behind conceptual alteration and the prospects of militating against these forces in our current global condition of heightened economic anxiety.

Partisan Differences in Spending Preferences after theNew Democrat and New Labour Transformations of Party Images

In this paper we wonder whether the efforts of the New Democrats and New Labour to alter their parties’ images with respect to public spending mute the differences (or lack thereof) in their supporters’ preferences for public spending between their respective major parties as observed by Lewis in the UK case and Lowery and Sigelman in the US case. 

We address this question by constructing matching UK and US data on aggregate public opinion on public spending at four points since 1980, treating the Clinton New Democrat and the Blair New Labour transformations as interventions that might be expected to alter the preferences of partisans for public spending. We find support for the thermostatic model of preferences for spending a result that raises questions about the power of party elites to shape the preferences of their supporters in the battle over the size of government.

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Greening a Machiavellian State? Insights for International Environmental Governance

This article is an appeal to common sense, once seen as the American virtue, as it may be applied to contemporary considerations of the contest over same-sex marriage. Specifically, I argue that all societies, including our own, are bound together by an underlying or fundamental common sense of a select few things. Each society builds upon these few universal fundamentals with its own particular mythic and social constructions. 

When any one society begins to lose sight of these original human fundamentals and relies instead upon new shared conceptions of its world based solely upon abstract instrumental reason, it not only risks creating social and political mistakes-these, we may be able to live with, if not correct. More importantly, when such mistakes completely detach us from our fundamental common sense of human society, we risk the loss of this very society itself. This we cannot live with, at least not together. In other words, no policy or legislation, no constitution, and no charter of rights can bind together a people determined to become unbound by their loss of a fundamental common sense of the things by which they are first constituted together as human beings. I write with hope that we Americans-humanity’s “last best hope”-are not yet so determined.