If the boundaries served the democratic nations tolerably well during the Cold War – in particular, by safeguarding the privacy of citizens – they set up those nations to fail in an age of terror. Terrorists respected none of those boundaries. They were not “over there” – they were both there and here, with the precise configurations changing and unpredictable. By the mid-2000s, for instance, the terrorist threat to Britain was almost entirely “domestic” – homegrown cells with tentacles reaching abroad, to Pakistan in particular. By contrast, for the United States, the problem was still primarily “over there,” although with its tendrils reaching into the United States. Whether that would change remained to be seen – and remained a task for intelligence in an age of terror.

Terrorists targeted not armies but rather private citizens. As a result, the so-called war on terrorism not only hyped the threat but also mislocated it, implying that military instruments, in which the United States reigned supreme, would be primary. While those terrorists might commit crimes, they might commit only one, and then it would be too late. They could not be dealt with as either an intelligence or a law enforcement problem; rather, they had to be treated as both.

By the same token, if organizing intelligence – on the collection side, by source, and on the analysis side, by agency – may have made a certain sense during the Cold War, it cannot be the right way to organize now.