What do US Spies Do? Don’t Ask America’s Espionage Chiefs

US lawmakers want the intelligence community to define what it does. They still don’t have an answer.

US intelligence agencies blew through a Sept. 30 deadline to define 23 terms such as “open source intelligence” and “signals intelligence” that would help explain how they conduct espionage. That’s prompting fresh concern from Congress and civil-society groups.

“How the government defines ‘open-source intelligence’ gets at the heart of the problem,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. He said he’s been asking the Office of Director of National Intelligence to be transparent with the American ...