Skip to main content

The Benefit Of TIFACS

Benefit to National And Global Security

If you’re thinking strategically, the question is less “What use is TIFACS to the CIA?” and more “What problem does TIFACS solve that existing institutions cannot easily solve on their own?” A few observations:

The CIA’s mission is not the same as TIFACS’ proposed mission

Intelligence agencies exist to collect, analyze, and act on information relevant to national security. Even if they have examined consciousness-related subjects, remote viewing, anomalous phenomena, or nonhuman intelligence in the past, their mandate is not public education, university curriculum development, global academic coordination, interfaith dialogue, or societal preparation.

Government institutions have structural limitations

Intelligence agencies operate largely in classified environments. Universities operate in academic environments. Religious organizations operate in spiritual environments. Legislatures operate in political environments. One argument for TIFACS is that it attempts to create a civilian forum where these domains can communicate without being constrained by the mission of any single institution.

Organizations are usually tolerated when they provide value

Historically, governments often ignore, cooperate with, critique, or compete with outside organizations depending on whether they perceive them as useful, credible, threatening, or irrelevant. The more an organization is seen as contributing serious research, public understanding, educational development, or policy analysis, the easier it becomes to justify its existence.

The strongest protection is credibility.
If TIFACS is viewed as:

  • Academically serious,
  • Methodologically rigorous,
  • Politically nonpartisan,
  • Transparent about evidence and uncertainty,
  • Focused on education and research,
  • Then it becomes much harder to dismiss as fringe or adversarial.

A Potential Value Proposition

If TIFACS were to succeed, one could argue that it serves as a civilian “thinking space” where difficult questions about consciousness, disclosure, public preparedness, and long-term societal implications can be explored openly. Governments often have difficulty conducting those discussions publicly because of political, legal, and bureaucratic constraints.

The larger strategic issue may not be how to “circumvent” an intelligence agency. Rather, it may be how to define TIFACS so that it is perceived as complementary rather than competitive.

If an institution believes:
“They are trying to expose us,” that creates one dynamic.

If an institution believes:
“They are helping society think through questions we are not structured to address,” that creates a very different dynamic.

For a proposal like this, long-term viability is probably more dependent on credibility, transparency, and usefulness than on confrontation. An organization that can produce high-quality research standards, educational frameworks, policy analysis, and public communication models may be seen as filling a gap that neither government, academia, nor private organizations are currently filling on their own.

That is where I would focus the strategic argument: not that TIFACS knows something government agencies do not, but that TIFACS addresses societal, educational, and institutional questions that government agencies are not designed to solve. So these institutions would benefit from the creation of TIFACS because they would have additional resources that TIFACS would provide.

TIFACS could function as a force multiplier by expanding the number of trained researchers, developing standardized educational pathways, creating long-term research roadmaps, reducing unnecessary duplication across institutions, and providing governments and universities with an independent source of scientific expertise that complements rather than competes with existing capabilities.

Intelligence operations having the resources, research and infrastructure to call on when their needs are not met by their own resources.

Removing redundancies in multiple intelligence operations thereby expanding ability and reach.