Aldrich, Richard J. "Intelligence" in Williams, Paul D. Security Studies: an Introduction. pp. 235-236.

Recent debates over intelligence have taken two forms. The first is what we might call an old fashioned ‘value for money’ argument about intelligence failures.

The American intelligence behemoth now spends close to $80 billion a year. Reportedly, some 845,000 people hold top-secret clearances allowing them to see its high-grade intelligence reports. Many are employed by some 2,000 private companies rather than the US government. In reality, no one is really sure how much this sprawling enterprise costs or how many people it employs. Politicians, practitioners and the public have all been vexed about poor performance, either in the context of the failure to warn of the 9/11 attacks or the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco. Intelligence has under-performed in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most observers agree that the current benefits from intelligence do not appear to be commensurate with the scale of spending.

The second debate is characterized by moral outrage. When public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff or Philppe Sands discuss security policies, the nefarious activities of intelligence agencies are often central to their discourse. This debate is about action and kinetic effects rather than briefings. Over the last decade, the CIA has become associated with renditions, secret detention sites and torture. When the Obama administration assumed office, the emphasis shifted towards secret drones strikes over Pakistan and the Yemen. The trend is moving away from ‘watch and wait’ to ‘capture and kill’. These new roles are hard to reconcile with core western values. Paradoxically secret intelligence has now become very public and its activities are increasingly taken to be symbolic of national security policy as a whole.

The second debate about intelligence ethics is symptomatic of the troubled transformation of intelligence across much of the western world. Intelligence services that had spent most of their time passively observing the Communist bloc in the 1980s were re-directed towards dealing with organized crime in the 1990s and then to the task of counter-terrorism after 2001. The changes that have occurred in the realm of intelligence are not merely about new targets. They are increasingly about action, disruption and event-sharing. Traditional Westphalian boundaries which outline clear divisions between foreign and domestic surveillance are collapsing – with multiple consequences.

p.237
Different definitions
Large parts of the overall national intelligence infrastructure are now in private hands
A third of CIA employees are private contractors so we can no longer claim that intelligence is a predominantly a state-based activity (Pincus and Barr 2007, Shorrock 2008).

p. 239
The debate on intelligence failure has been greayly intensified by two events: the 9/11 attacks and the fiasco over Iraqi WMD programme in 2002. Countries as disparate as the US, UK, Israel Australia and Denmark launched inquiries into their own local versions of the vexed WMD intelligence fiasco. Yet even as these inquiries proceeded, intelligence budgets continued to climb at a dizzying rate, suggesting an inverse - even perverse - relationship between performance and reward.
In the world of intelligence, nothing succeeds like failure since budgets tend to increase in the wake of major disasters in the hope of avoiding another one.