Law and Politics of Spying and Lying

As far back as the Revolutionary War, American citizens have been engaged in secret intelligence operations in wartime. Over the past eighty years, the US government has made secret intelligence and covert operations a regular part of its toolkit for dealing with foreign challenges or domestic threats in peacetime as well as wartime. Reconciling these secret activities and the institutions and individuals responsible for them with a democratic Republic based on checks and balances and electoral accountability has been a ceaseless work-in-progress, whose tempo increases or decreases depending on world and domestic events.

Regardless of the tempo, however, the overarching question is unchanged: Can secret intelligence activities–including lying to deny or mask the government’s involvement–be reconciled with American democracy? This seminar examines the law, policy, and history of U.S. intelligence activities. It explores such issues as the constitutional allocations of power for intelligence, the evolution of American intelligence organizations over time, dilemmas created by new surveillance technologies and ways to address them (or not), congressional oversight of covert action–including lethal force–in which the U.S. government intends to hide its hand, and the roles of courts and the press as checks.

This is a joint offering between SIPA and the Law School, because the history, policy, and law of American intelligence activities are so intertwined. To understand the future in this area, one must understand those interconnections.