Governmental Transparency in the US Intelligence Community: A National Security Agency Case Study
Open Access DepositedThe global popularity of governmental transparency has grown significantly in the last three decades and continues to influence initiatives aimed at creating higher levels of openness. Even in some of the most challenging environments, transparency programs have been implemented to varying degrees of success. In the US, the Obama Administration took transparency to areas of the federal government that traditionally had not embraced openness to include the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. This dissertation examines how the intelligence community approached the transparency initiatives of the Obama administration and what results, if any, were realized. I begin with an introduction to transparency, the initiatives of the late 2000s, and a brief description of the US intelligence community. I follow that introduction with an in-depth analysis of the current literature on governmental transparency and identify the major themes associated with the phenomenon. I then collected data from a number of sources within the intelligence community, focusing collection efforts on the National Security Agency (NSA), which I employed as a representative case study. My data sources include unclassified, publicly available intelligence community documents focused on transparency initiatives. I also employed a series of semi-structured interviews with current and former senior NSA leaders as well as media and civil society organizational representatives to provide a holistic view of transparency initiatives and their effects. My case study approach enabled me to identify findings at both the organizational and individual levels. I found that organizational culture can limit the implementation of even the most thorough and deliberate transparency initiatives and that outside catalytic events and focused leadership can be employed to overcome the challenge of an organization resistant to change. I detailed the efforts within the community and the actions taken to implement the Obama Administration’s open government initiatives, with a focus on increasing organizational transparency. Practitioners can benefit from several findings of this study including the identification of best practices and proven approaches to transparency initiatives to build community trust. This dissertation also provides researchers with a more thorough understanding of governmental transparency, especially in areas with a security-transparency conflict.
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