We don't know much about Clinton's proposed "intelligence surge"

Little is publicly known about Clinton's oft-repeated call for an "intelligence surge" to defeat Daesh and prevent terrorism on US soil.

In the third and final presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and GOP nominee Donald Trump largely reiterated previous positions each has staked out regarding plans to defeat ISIS or Daesh and how to deal with, or ignore, the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Trump, for his part, exuded typical bigotry in referring to Muslim immigrants as "the great Trojan horse" who "are definitely in many cases, ISIS-aligned." Clinton responded in a more nuanced way, though her response is also telling. She repeated her call for "an intelligence surge that protects us here at home," and reiterated her support for using the controversial no-fly list as a basis for denying gun purchases. "If you're too dangerous to fly, you're too dangerous to buy a gun," she said. Little is publicly known about Clinton's oft-repeated call for an "intelligence surge" to defeat Daesh and prevent terrorism on US soil, but some civil liberties groups and Muslim advocates are wary of Clinton's proposal, given the surveillance abuses that have been carried out in the decade and a half since 9/11. Despite the apparent centrality of this proposal to her larger counterterrorism goals, Clinton hasn't made clear what digital or physical surveillance programs or capabilities she would seek to put in place.

One of her few specific proposals -- the so-called No Fly, No Buy policy -- is particularly troubling to critics, who charge that the bloated watchlist is riddled with errors and false positives, is nearly impossible to get off once a person is placed on it, and affects Muslims almost exclusively.

The ACLU sued the government over the secretive process through which people are added to the No Fly List, and opposes using that database as a form of gun control. The other issue is that in Clinton's rhetoric, Muslims "always [come] up in the context of a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone who claims their Islamic faith supports their actions. It boils down to her saying that somehow the Muslim community would be more suspect than others." Clinton began calling for an intelligence surge after the Daesh-linked attacks in Paris in November 2015 and has since repeated the phrase regularly.

She first laid out the basics of her proposal in a Democratic Primary debate in November, when she called for "an immediate intelligence surge in the region, including technical assets, Arabic speakers with deep expertise in the Middle East, and even closer partnership with regional intelligence services." Since then she has added more policies to that broad outline, including increased monitoring of social media posts. Viewed in the most sympathetic light, Clinton is simply pushing for increased cooperation and data-sharing with countries in Europe and the Middle East, and for funding community-based programs in the United States to identify and divert Americans who show signs of a proclivity toward political violence. Often left unstated is that this policy is only ever discussed as one that will be applied to Muslims (although most people who perpetrate political violence in the US are not Muslim).

A more critical reading of Clinton's plan is that as president she will push for increased surveillance of Muslim communities across the United States and Europe, and double down on discredited social science that purports to be able to identify signs of impending violence in individuals. Some Muslim advocates worry that Clinton's plan would make it harder for Muslim Americans to voice criticism of US foreign policy in mosques, and that her approach could breed distrust among communities already wary of law enforcement influence, whether hidden or overt.

For now, most experts agree that the public doesn't have enough information to adequately evaluate Clinton's proposal. Speaking in Minneapolis in mid-December, Clinton appeared to be open to providing government agents with tools to break strong encryption. "Law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals warn that impenetrable encryption may make it harder for them to investigate plots and prevent future attacks," Clinton said. Days later, at another primary debate, Clinton called for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to encryption, baffling many security experts. In the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida in June 2016 Clinton again called for an intelligence surge.

(By John Knefel who is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn)

AJ/EA