Democratic Faith Principles

Words: 495
Pages: 2

The fundamental characteristic that has the greatest impact on the intelligence community is the democratic faith. Democratic faith is the principle on which all others are built upon. Without having faith in the democracy all the other principles are dreams and not goals. It is important to understand that all the democratic principles are needed for a successfully run government, but the faith in the ideals are what drives them.
The democratic faith principle is based on the notion of free press, power sharing, and decentralization (Sarkesian, Williams, Cimabala, 2013). The principle also uses the education of people to lead to a more successful society. The enlightenment of the people and their education are things the American public
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For instance as stated earlier the democratic faith calls on an informed public, this can be increasingly difficult when the intelligence community generally deals with secrecy. A majority of the intelligence gathered is not to be released to the public for some time, and the way that the intelligence was gathered is also its own form of secrecy. The impact on the Intelligence community can be felt from the heads of the agencies all the way down to analysts. As stated earlier the common goal is national security, this can weigh heavy on individuals with high democratic faith. An example of this can be seen with the controversial former security contractor, Edward Snowden. Snowden used his democratic faith principle as a reason to inform the American public of the intelligence communities gathering and storage of metadata. It was Snowden’s opinion that the form in which the metadata was being obtained was an overreach. This had a huge impact on the community because of the resulting change of policy and brought added negative attention to policymakers and the intelligence community as a