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"In the intelligence business, bigger is not necessarily better."
-Bruce Riedel, former Central Intelligence Agency analyst
n this age of digitalization and technology, intelligence agencies across the globe process massive amounts of information about individuals, sub-state actors, and governments every .day. Intelligence experts and military leaders often assume that the goal of intelligence work is to gather as much information as possible in order to formulate a more comprehensive picture of the world. The United States, in particular, has become a global epicenter of intelligence work-4.2 million US citizens, more than 10% of the country's population, have some form of security clearance.
However, this aggressive intelligence gathering does not make for betterinformed government agencies or higher quality security policy. Instead, excessive information collection leads to information overload on both the individual and institutional levels, impairing the US intelligence community's ability to do its job. What's more, US government agencies do not use this information effectively, due to overclassification problems. These inefficiencies in intelligence ultimately sow instability in the international system and increase the likelihood of conflict between states.
Too Much Information
The US intelligence community is currently inundated with information. This poses a serious challenge to effective intelligence work. Overwhelmed by data, analysts lose the ability to pick out what is important and fail to make good judgments. In a 1970 book, futurist Alvin Toffler of the International Institute for Strategic Studies coined the term "information overload" to describe situations in which an excess of information results in poorer decision making. Today, this phenomenon holds true on both an individual and an institutional level. Modern psychology teaches that the human brain can only focus effectively on so much information at a time. As a person tries to complete more tasks simultaneously, his or her efficacy in dealing with each individual task diminishes in a phenomenon called "cognitive overload." Psychologist Lucy Jo Palladino writes that information overload leads to added stress, indecisiveness, and less effective analysis of decisions. This feature of human attention has clear implications for security policy: attempting to collect more and more information makes a nation less secure when it overloads intelligence analysts.
Information overload carries over to the institutional level in three ways. First, institutional skill is in some ways nothing more...
