DNI Issues Directives on History, Sourcing, Priorities
“The United States Intelligence Community (IC) has an obligation to learn from its history and its performance and to document its activities,” Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell wrote in a newly disclosed Intelligence Community Directive.
Towards that end, “each IC agency/organization shall establish and maintain a professional historical capability… to document, analyze and advance an understanding of the history of the agency or organization and its predecessors.”
See “Intelligence Community History Programs” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 180, August 29, 2007.
Another new DNI directive instructs intelligence analysts that “disseminated analytic products must contain consistent and structured sourcing information for all significant and substantive reporting or other information upon which the product’s analytic judgments, assessments, estimates, or confidence levels depend.”
“Thorough and consistent documentation enhances the credibility and transparency of intelligence analysis and enables consumers to better understand the quantity and quality of information underlying the analysis.”
See “Sourcing Requirements for Disseminated Analytic Products” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 206, October 17, 2007.
Intelligence collection and analysis objectives are defined and ranked through something called the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF), which “is the DNI’s sole mechanism for establishing national intelligence priorities.”
Based on topics approved by the President, the NIPF provides a process for prioritizing competing intelligence requirements and allocating resources accordingly.
See “Roles and Responsibilities for the National Intelligence Priorities Framework” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 204, September 13, 2007.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.
This runs counter to public opinion: 4 in 5 of all Americans, across party lines, want to see the government take stronger climate action.