Intelligence Agency Roles and Relationships
Intelligence Agency Roles and Relationships
The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is comprised of executive branch agencies engaged in intelligence activities necessary for the protection of US national security. The President and U.S. policymaking officials, law enforcement, and military communities rely on the IC to provide the intelligence to support their efforts in the protection of national and homeland security. The Intelligence Community faces persistent challenges and transnational issues. The IC must be agile in adapting to emerging threats and harnessing opportunities. The IC has been criticized for its lack of coordination, cooperation, and intelligence-sharing leading to intelligence failures such as the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Parts of the criticism of the IC are duplicative roles and responsibilities and an inability to communicate and share necessary intelligence with intelligence stakeholders. As a result, questions about the effectiveness of the IC persist. This paper will discuss two of the agencies within the intelligence community by defining and differentiate the roles and responsibilities of each agency, explaining the duplicity and gaps in the agencies, and lastly assess the implications of these responsibilities and practices for national and homeland security.
Define and Differentiate
On paper, CIA and NSA are mostly international intelligence gathering agencies, while other agencies in the Intelligence Community (IC) are domestic agencies. But they have many overlaps in information sharing and shared jurisdictions in some cases. As a practical matter, NSA in particular, seems to be playing both sides of the field international and domestic, but communications are world-wide now so it's difficult to cull out purely domestic communications. According to Intelligence (n.d.), “The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is responsible for providing...