The Growing Number of Private Intelligence Corporations

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Throughout the course of history, wars have been fought with Nation-state’s armies. Along with traditional armies came along traditional intelligence gathering by the armies themselves. Throughout history much of the intelligence gathered was by both the army and private citizens. This is only the beginning. In the Post 9/11 world the need for intelligence gathering is far from being satisfied. This leaves a wide open gap in the system and to fill that gap many private agencies such as Stratfor, Global Strategies Group and iJET have moved in and started to fill. The question that seems to pop up from many places is the legal standing of these agencies and who exactly governs their activities? Is the answer to move more intelligence operations to the private sector?
The history of the private intelligence goes all the way back to the Civil war with Allan Pinkerton and his company Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton provided these services to Abraham Lincoln. Ever since then the outsourcing of US intelligence services has been an option that is often used. Most generally speaking the type of intelligence that is often outsourced is the OSINT or better known as Open Source Intelligence. The often cited benefit of the contracting of intelligence operations to the private industry is that the private industry is a change from the highly centralized counterpart within the US government. After the 9/11 Commission report cited many problems within the current intelligence community congress set out to remedy the problem.
Congress’s answer to the problems set forth in the commission’s report was to expand the intelligence community to private contractors to fulfill the war time need for more intelligence. When this occurred ...

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...e Contracting Is Here to Stay » News & Publications » The Institute of World Politics. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2014. .
Schultz, Norman O. "The Ethics of Business Intelligence." Journal of Business Ethics 13.4 (1994): 305-14. JSTOR. Web. 08 Apr. 2014. .
Williams, Steve, and Nancy Williams. The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2007. Print
WILLINGHAM, BRIAN. "A Private Detective’s Approach to Intelligence Gathering [INFOGRAPHIC]." Diligentia Group Professional Private Investigator New York RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. .

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