From a policy standpoint, I like to think of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a good-faith attempt at providing "sufficient statistics" of otherwise sensitive data -- having trusted elected officials peruse classified information, collate it into the essential set of decisions the public might formulate should they have full access, then let the public debate proceed along the transformed decision space.
For the outcomes to be truly unbiased, a number of assumptions should be enforced, that are being insufficiently upheld:
- the sample of the senators in the committee should to be representative of the people's interests. The 8/7 member split between parties sounds nice and non-partisan but might be biased in favour of the minority. Also, nomination to the post depends on party favour.
- a mechanism guaranteeing that the intelligence committee obtains ALL pertinent documents sans curation by the agencies. It's certainly ridiculous that there's even the possibility the CIA could claim that the Intelligence Committee obtained some documents illegally.
- finally, a notion of weighting actions appropriately. The intelligence committee is not in the business of taking action in itself, but making recommendations for the rest of congress to act on (subject to weights based on their political stances and the requirements of the situation). These weights are unfortunately being re-normalized to near even odds along purely political lines in the senate and in the media.
While the representational biases can be repaired somewhat with appropriate procedure, the final problem of retaining the right weights for actions doesn't seem solvable so long as the first amendment is around. One can't silence Fox/MSNBC pundits constantly trying to put their spins on every debate, and it's difficult to correctly evaluate these solutions unless the public can actually gauge the adequacy of each approach against all the data.
tl;dr: IMO the ability to take optimal rational decisions via proxy opinions from the intelligence committee is severely mitigated by biases inherent in the institution. So long as the committee model persists it may be possible to mitigate these biases but impossible to completely eliminate them.
For the outcomes to be truly unbiased, a number of assumptions should be enforced, that are being insufficiently upheld: - the sample of the senators in the committee should to be representative of the people's interests. The 8/7 member split between parties sounds nice and non-partisan but might be biased in favour of the minority. Also, nomination to the post depends on party favour. - a mechanism guaranteeing that the intelligence committee obtains ALL pertinent documents sans curation by the agencies. It's certainly ridiculous that there's even the possibility the CIA could claim that the Intelligence Committee obtained some documents illegally. - finally, a notion of weighting actions appropriately. The intelligence committee is not in the business of taking action in itself, but making recommendations for the rest of congress to act on (subject to weights based on their political stances and the requirements of the situation). These weights are unfortunately being re-normalized to near even odds along purely political lines in the senate and in the media.
While the representational biases can be repaired somewhat with appropriate procedure, the final problem of retaining the right weights for actions doesn't seem solvable so long as the first amendment is around. One can't silence Fox/MSNBC pundits constantly trying to put their spins on every debate, and it's difficult to correctly evaluate these solutions unless the public can actually gauge the adequacy of each approach against all the data.
tl;dr: IMO the ability to take optimal rational decisions via proxy opinions from the intelligence committee is severely mitigated by biases inherent in the institution. So long as the committee model persists it may be possible to mitigate these biases but impossible to completely eliminate them.