WASHINGTON — A congressional panel, created long before the recent revelations about the American government’s electronic spying operations, issued a blistering report on Tuesday charging that the intelligence world’s research-and-development efforts are disorganised 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 US inventions.

In a separate white paper on cyber-capabilities — an area in which the Defence Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Cyber Command have made big investments — the panel, National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programmes of the United States Intelligence Community, concludes that President Barack Obama’s efforts to differentiate the roles of competing agencies have largely failed.

One member of the commission, Ms Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found particular fault with the intelligence agencies’ approach, “which involves gathering more data than you need”.

Though it makes no reference to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records, Ms Jackson appeared to be referring to efforts like it. THE NEW YORK TIMES