The MI5 model
=============

The MI5 model is John Kiriakou's name for a proposal he says he first heard discussed inside the agency in the early 1990s, and which he expected the domestic-terrorism legislation drafted after 6 January 2021 to deliver at last. Pressed in February 2021 on a bill that created new domestic terrorism units inside the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI rather than any new offence, his answer was that the idea was not new: "that's been discussed since the early 1990s."

His own introduction to it came abroad.

> "On my very first trip to London as a CIA officer, I'd been to London many times, of course, but on my first trip as a CIA officer, we talked with MI5 about their duties as a domestic intelligence service. MI6 is famously the foreign intelligence service. MI5 does only domestic intelligence. They don't have the power to arrest, but they don't need to arrest anybody. That's what Scotland Yard is for."

The American application was on the table in the same conversations. "The discussions way back then, I mean, this must have been 1992 or 1993, we were talking about setting a similar thing up in the United States, either parallel to the FBI or as a part of the FBI, that would just spy on American citizens and then provide that intelligence to the FBI to effect arrests."

What he draws from the gap is that the design outlasted every justification offered for it: "here we are all these years later, 30 years later, and it looks like it's gonna come to pass."

See also

- MI6
- The Grenier counterinsurgency op-ed
- Mass Surveillance
- John Kiriakou
