US Is Losing Advantage in Spying, Report Says

A congressional panel created long before the recent revelations about government electronic spying operations issued a blistering report charging that the intelligence world’s research-and-development efforts are disorganized and unfocused.

An unclassified version of the report, based on two years of work by independent experts and two officials from inside the agencies, concludes that the United States is losing its technological superiority over its rivals, which are gaining “asymmetric advantages” by making their own investments in such efforts and, in some cases, stealing American inventions. In a separate white paper on cybercapabilities -- an area in which the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command have made big investments -- the panel, the National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the United States Intelligence Community, concludes that President Obama’s efforts to differentiate the roles of competing agencies have largely failed.