The CIA's experiment with In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm it started in 1999 to develop private-sector technologies for use in the intelligence world, "makes good business sense" and should continue, a congressionally mandated study said on Tuesday.
But the Central Intelligence Agency needs to streamline its bureaucratic process for approving new technologies for its classified computer system to make it quicker and easier to get them in the door at the spy agency, the report said.
US intelligence agencies have been criticized in recent years for being behind the curve on technological advances made by the private sector.
To address that issue, the CIA set up and funds In-Q-Tel as a five-year experiment in investing in high-tech companies to acquire innovative technology for the spy agency's use.
The report by the Business Executives for National Security, a non-profit, non-partisan organization of business leaders selected by the CIA to conduct the study, was made public on Tuesday. It can be accessed at www.bens.org.
The report praised the CIA and Congress for "breaking with tradition and demonstrating a willingness to take a risk when attacking a technological challenge."
The CIA should streamline a process that currently requires new technology to be reviewed by six separate boards and go through more than 130 procedural steps before it is accepted, the business group said.
That process "to my mind is evidence of a bureaucracy that needs to transform itself to a much more agile, flexible, much faster acquirer and implementer of new technology," C. Lawrence Meador, chairman of the panel that did the study, said.
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