Understanding The Director Of National Intelligence

While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is one, centralized agency, securing the homeland involves the cooperation and collaboration of many, different agencies and organizations ranging from local law enforcement to national agencies such as the NSA, CIA, and FBI. Each of these agencies contributes to the development of homeland security intelligence. By carefully analyzing and commenting on the objectives, tasks, strengths, weaknesses, and roles of each agency, a larger picture emerges regarding the capabilities and limitation of intelligence in supporting homeland security efforts.

Counterintelligence is one of the most vital areas of the United States intelligence system, and is heavily intertwined with our history, laws and ethics. According to the National Security Act of 1947, counterintelligence (CI) is defined as “information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted by or on behalf of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations or foreign persons, or international terrorist activities.” It consists of five activities and functions: operations, investigations, collection, analysis and production, and functional services. In this aspect, CI is unique in that it is both an activity and its product. U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collect and analyze both CI information and foreign intelligence. There are many counterintelligence activities that the United States is involved in, as both CI and foreign intelligence play an important role in countering threats to our country’s national security. Among these most controversial and misunderstood activities are counterespionage and disinformation.

Question #1 – Describe two process differences between the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP). Which budget funds the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP)? Briefly describe the DNI’s budget “hammer” over the IC.

The DNI has modestly more power than the old Directors of Central Intelligence (DCIs), but not enough to give the ODNI/AIS real clout. “Herding cats” remains a decent description of the ODNI’s basic role. The DNI has several duties and responsibilities, but for the subject of improving intelligence information sharing the focus will be directed towards: Improving Analytics, Improving Information Security, Improving Foreign Liaison Relationships, and the end state of Improving Information Sharing.

Intelligence analysts in the IC, DHS, and FBI are tasked with the primary responsibility of developing threat assessments against the United States and national critical infrastructure. The

The 1776 united States of America Declaration of Independence contain the words that succinctly describe our national objective, strategy, and message, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In today’s United States of America, the world acknowledges American’s as the preeminent owner of individual freedoms, holding and promoting these three basic principles for some 240 years. During these years, the U.S. has employed the use of intelligence to shape its objectives and strategies, and then in times of war used the same intelligence to shape strategic messages against foreign powers. However, as hostilities decline and give way to the restoration of relative peace, the use of intelligence for strategic messages against foreign powers ceases. Under these circumstances, the void created by secession of U.S. messages, provides a communication opportunity to foreign powers for transmission of anti-U.S. messages. Attempts have been made to reinstate the offices that during war countered these anti-U.S. messages to a comprehensive reorganization of the U.S Government intelligence community. This paper does not support creation of a new agency or department to utilize existing strategic intelligence.

Since 2010, integration has been the vanguard initiative of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). This initiative has been successful in several areas to include: the creation of National Intelligence Managers (NIM) for all primary geographic regions and functional areas; enhanced transparency; and the focus on the negative impacts of over classifying documents. However, not all efforts to integrate the intelligence community (IC) have been successful. For instance, the ODNI did not succeed at creating a comprehensive sharing environment, and has not fully integrated federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. Although, these failed areas of integration can be mitigated in the future through the appropriate initiatives taken by the ODNI.

Perhaps the most important change in how the federal government was reorganized after September 11th is the creation of both the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 with the passage of the same IRTPA that created TSA. This concept had been first suggested in 1955 after a study by Congress then and was recommended time and again but only became a reality after the September 11th attacks drove the need for major intelligence reform home and the 9/11 Commission continued the push for the creation of such a position (ODNI, n.d., paras. 1-5). As one can see from the mission and vision of the ODNI, the importance cannot be overstated. The mission includes leading intelligence integration while having the IC produce the most insightful intelligence products possible and the vision is fully integrating the IC thus making the nation more secure (ODNI, n.d., paras. 1-2).

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks was among the agencies that associated the 9/11 attacks with lack of coordination among agencies (Best, 2015). This prompted the Congress to enact a legislation that established a centralized intelligence leadership, popular as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). However, the legislation only helped to increase tension between different agencies, especially on how to approach funding. The legislation was not clear regarding the boundaries between the activities of the DNI, and their interaction with the mainstream intelligence agencies. The congress debated these concerns and later established the framework for the working of the DNI and relationship with different intelligence agencies. Most importantly, this legislation focused on one element of reorganization, which was enhancing coordination of activities between different

Since the birth of America the United States has made the use of intelligence known through the purposes of warfare, defense, and diplomacy. Intelligence is the gathering of information which is analyzed and converted into data to serve as an asset to the decision making process. This is possible by identifying what the national interest is at the time. We use intelligence to provide information based off everyday observations and activities to give us a sense of patterns to form an idea of the “big picture” and identify what threats may be imminent at the time. With reference to Homeland Security Intelligence is not to solely acquire life threatening data, rather than should be to analyzes and share information between the private sector,

Counterintelligence (CI) involves actions aimed at protecting the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage from penetration and disruption by hostile nations or their intelligence services (Lowenthal, 2014). Three main components of Counterintelligence include collection, defensive and offensive. Collection is ability to gather intelligence information about rivalry capabilities against own nation; defensive part of CI involve measures to prevent and thwarting other nations attempts to penetration into own nations intelligence system; while offensive deal with running double agents to penetrate, manipulate, exploit, and control targeted adversaries. CI is said to be the most essential aspect of the intelligence disciplines, in the sense that collecting vast quantities of secret information and produce excellent analysis of the intelligence, but ineffective counterintelligence measures may diminish confidence the final results (Van Cleave, 2013). According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (2011) “Significant advances have been made in clarifying and rectifying intelligence gaps and requirements through the formation of liaison and working relationships with other U.S. intelligence community agencies, foreign partners, the private sector, and academia”. For instance, since 2001, FBI CI program has resulted to total arrests of 249, of which 46 of them were linked to espionage. Counterintelligence (CI)

and ensure resilience to disasters. In order to achieve these goals, intelligence is necessary. The Office of Intelligence and Analysis, a subsection to the DHS focuses on obtaining and analyzing intelligence and puts them into the Homeland Security Enterprise which primarily

intelligence, he briefs the President, has authority to develop the budget for the national intelligence effort and manage appropriations made by Congress, and, to some extent, can transfer personnel and funds from one agency to another.3 I believe that the creation of the DNI position had been on the table for a few years, but the intelligence failures of communication between the agencies and being able to connect the dots to see the events leading up to 9/11 was the last drop in the bucket. I do not think that this organization has worked out all there kinks along with the other organizations in the Intelligence Community completely being open with them, however, I do feel that their roles and placement in the chain is a much needed

Vital to this are on-going threat assessments. Effective threat assessment is the need for abundant, timely and useable intelligence, about potential terrorist sponsors, perpetrators, activities and targets, as well as intelligence to guide our prevention and preparation activities and programs.  Despite the transnational nature of many terrorist groups, challenges to integrating foreign intelligence with domestic law enforcement information remains.

Counterintelligence (CI) involves actions aimed at protecting the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage from penetration and disruption by hostile nations or their intelligence services (Lowenthal, 2014). Three main components of Counterintelligence include collection, defensive and offensive. The collection is the ability to gather intelligence information about rivalry capabilities against own nation; defensive part of CI involves measures to prevent and thwart other nations ' attempts to penetrate into own nation 's intelligence system; while an offensive aspect deal with running double agents to penetrate, manipulate, exploit, and control targeted adversaries. CI is said to be the most essential aspect of the intelligence disciplines, in the sense that it helps in collecting vast quantities of secret information and produce an excellent analysis of intelligence, although, ineffective counterintelligence measures may diminish confidence in the final results (Van Cleave, 2013).