Prolific Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner has become one of the nation’s leading experts on domestic intelligence issues (see previous posts here, here and here) and is the author of Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform ( Rowman & Littlefield 2006). In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Judge Posner says that it’s time to quit placing the round peg of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the square hole of counterterrorism:

Is it the case that the FBI is “incapable of effective counterterrorism,” as an editorial in this newspaper wondered? Does the country need “to debate again whether domestic antiterror functions should be taken from the FBI and given to a new agency modeled after Britain’s MI5”?
The answer to both questions is yes. [. . .]
For prosecutors and detectives, success is measured by arrests, convictions and sentences. That is fine when the object is merely to keep the crime rate within tolerable limits. But the object of counterterrorism is prevention. Terrorist attacks are too calamitous for the punishment of the terrorists who survive the attack to be an adequate substitute for prevention.
Detecting terrorist plots in advance so that they can be thwarted is the business of intelligence agencies. The FBI is not an intelligence agency, and has a truncated conception of intelligence: gathering information that can be used to obtain a conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses and often physical evidence and even suspects. This enables a criminal investigation to be tightly focused. Prevention, in contrast, requires casting a very wide investigative net, chasing down ambiguous clues, and assembling tiny bits of information (hence the importance of information technology, which plays a limited role in criminal investigations).
The bureau lacks the tradition, the skills, the patience, the incentive structures, the recruitment criteria, the training methods, the languages, the cultural sensitivities and the career paths that national-security intelligence requires. All the bureau’s intelligence operations officers undergo the full special-agent training. That training emphasizes firearms skills, arrest techniques and self-defense, and the legal rules governing criminal investigations. None of these proficiencies are germane to national-security intelligence. What could be more perverse than to train new employees for one kind of work and assign them to another for which they have not been trained?

Read the entire op-ed. Despite my reservations about creating another governmental agency with the power to spy on citizens, what Judge Posner advocates makes a lot of sense.