The IC develops and maintains intelligence and information sharing relationships with international, military, domestic, and private sector partners to promote intelligence-related communications, standardize processes for collaboration, lead coordination of IC information sharing and foreign liaison issues, identify emerging issues, forge solutions in support of military operations, and maximize the use of private sector information and expertise to support intelligence missions while protecting privacy and civil liberties. Examples of these activities include:
INFORMATION SHARING ENVIRONMENT
The Information Sharing Environment (ISE) was established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA). Section 1016 of IRTPA embraced the key principles of Executive Order 13356, Strengthening the Sharing of Terrorism Information to Protect Americans, and directed the establishment of the ISE “for sharing terrorism information among all appropriate Federal, State, local, and tribal entities, and the private sector." The President was charged with creating the ISE, designating its organization and management structure, and determining and enforcing the policies and rules to govern the ISE’s content and usage.
The law further required many attributes for the ISE to include: “a decentralized, distributed, and coordinated environment” that “to the greatest extent practicable ... connects existing systems, ... builds upon existing systems capabilities currently in use across the Government, ... facilitates the sharing of information at and across all levels of security, ... and incorporates protections for individuals’ privacy and civil liberties.”
The ISE provides analysts, operators and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These individuals come from a variety of communities—law enforcement, public safety, homeland security, intelligence, defense, and foreign affairs—and may work for federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial governments. They also have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies. As ISE participants, federal agencies and state, local, tribal, and private sector partners deliver, and operate, the ISE and are responsible for sharing to enable end-to-end mission processes that support counterterrorism.
In-STeP: The Intelligence Science & Technology Partnership
Strong, if often quiet, partnerships between the U.S. private and public sectors remain the cornerstone of ensuring an overwhelming intelligence advantage for our nation’s decision makers and warfighters. In-STeP is designed to empower the IC S&T enterprise and its partners to properly inform investment decisions by ensuring additional synergy in intelligence-related research efforts
These partnerships are furthered through In-STeP 1-on-1 Meetings. These meetings provide the opportunity to present S&T projects to IC stakeholders. More than 50 meetings have been scheduled since the spring of 2015. The In-STeP Brochure below contains more information about the In-STeP 1-on-1 Meetings and how you can get involved.
In-VEST: Intelligence Ventures in Exploratory Science and Technology
Stimulating cutting-edge public- and private-sector research is critical to ensuring strategic and tactical intelligence advantage for our nation’s policymakers and warfighters. Building upon the new science opportunities identified by the ODNI’s Intelligence Science & Technology Partnership (In-STeP) technology roadmaps, In-VEST is intended to provide the private sector with early signals for the types of advanced technology that the IC is anticipated to require, providing industry and academia an opportunity to invest appropriately now to support the IC’s future needs. In parallel, In-VEST will leverage and influence U.S. Government-wide research to help meet these same challenges.
The In-VEST program is designed to be the catalyst for accelerating R&D activities to meet select In-STeP-identified challenges. Using complementary requests for information (RFIs) and prize challenge competitions, In-VEST seeks to stimulate private-sector investments and leverage—or at a minimum, influence—current initiatives relevant to these challenges. For more detailed information, our In-VEST brochure is available here.
IARPA
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity invests in high-risk/high-payoff research to provide the U.S. with an overwhelming intelligence advantage. As the only research organization within the ODNI, IARPA works with the other 16 IC elements to address the IC’s most challenging problems that can be solved with science and technology.
IARPA performs no research in-house; rather, it funds researchers in colleges, universities, companies, National Labs, and other organizations, in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, asset validation and identity intelligence, bio-security, chemical detection, cyber security, high performance computing, human judgment, linguistics, radio frequency geolocation, and secure manufacturing of microelectronics.
In addition to using traditional contracts and grants, IARPA uses public challenges to award cash prizes to researchers for innovative solutions that achieve specific goals. To date, IARPA has funded over 500 unique organizations (academia, small businesses, large businesses and non-profits). Over 1,500 unique bidders have been part of research proposals and abstracts submitted to IARPA.
GLOBAL TRENDS
Every four years since 1997, the National Intelligence Council has published its Global Trends report, an unclassified strategic assessment of how key trends and uncertainties might shape the world over the next 20 years to help senior US leaders think and plan for the longer term. The report is timed to be especially relevant for the administration of a newly elected U.S. President, but Global Trends increasingly has served to foster discussions about the future with people around the world.
These global consultations, both in preparing the paper and sharing the results, help the NIC and broader U.S. Government learn from perspectives beyond the United States and are useful in sparkling discussions about key assumptions, priorities, and choices.
Since 1979, the NIC has served a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities, as well as a facilitator for outreach to outside experts. The NIC's National Intelligence Officers, drawn from government, academia and the private sector, are the IC's senior substantive experts on a range of issues and work under the auspices of the ODNI.
The NIC covers the regions of the world as well as functional topics, such as economics, security, technology, cyber, terrorism, and the environment. The NIC coordinates Intelligence Community support for U.S. policy deliberations while producing papers and formal National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on critical national security questions.