Broader U.s. Government And Ic Intelligence Needs

Increasingly, conflicts among U.S. adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are conducted in the realms of technology and finance.40

This challenge requires new tools, authorities, and technological expertise across the U.S. government, par- ticularly at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is housed at the Treasury Department.

An incoming conservative President should task his DNI and Secretary of Commerce with increasing coordination, the resources needed for BIS and SCIF capacity, and proper and necessary intelligence sharing to counter the activities of multifaceted adversaries such as China. This would include additional work with private-sector expertise, granting clearances to niche sector experts and United States citizen commercial and financial partners as needed.

Cover in the Digital Age. Even in the public domain, it is becoming increas- ingly clear that protecting the identities of undercover intelligence officers is difficult in the digital age.41 The truth is that as our daily activities are conducted predominantly in the digital domain, our antiquated system for providing cover to undercover officers has lagged woefully behind the threat from foreign adversaries. The DIA, CIA, and FBI are increasingly aware of this threat and are devoting resources to the problem. Their back-office infrastructure, however, is such that they are still using methods for providing cover from decades past that put valuable intelligence officers at unnecessary risk. How intelligence officers and their fami- lies are taught to use smartphones and social media, travel, conduct banking, and take and share pictures—even how and when they are paid—can make it difficult to protect identities.42 Legends, fake backstories, and identities are often weak, incomplete, and unable to stand up to a basic Google search.43 Officers operat- ing under nonofficial cover are offered even less protection and training to help them succeed.

In addition, ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) techniques being refined by technologies emanating from the regimes in China and Russia will continue to be highly challenging for intelligence officers. An incoming Administration will need to double down on resourcing and training so that members of the IC will have the expertise they need to operate clandestinely (and successfully) against hard targets. Privacy Shield. For many years, the European Union (EU) has tried to force U.S. companies operating in Europe to follow its data privacy regulations. Misleading claims in the 2013 Snowden leaks destroyed the initial Safe Harbor Framework44 that allowed American companies to transfer data across the Atlantic; its succes- sor, the Privacy Shield Framework,45 was struck down by European courts on the grounds that it provides insufficient protections for EU citizens against hypothet- ical U.S. government surveillance. Those same European courts exempted the intelligence services of EU member states from the standards applied to the U.S., suggesting that trade protectionism may be the real motive behind data privacy regulations.

In 2022, the Biden Administration negotiated a new agreement, the Trans-At- lantic Data Privacy Framework,46 intended to withstand European legal challenges. Given the fate of its predecessors, it is not certain that it will survive. Executive Order 14086, “Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activi- ties,”47 implements this new framework by attempting to align signals intelligence collection practices with European privacy regulations. At most, the executive order’s changes will be helpful support for the framework in future European litigation; at worst, they could throw sand in the gears of important intelli- gence programs.

An incoming conservative President should reset Europe’s expectations. Brus- sels has always arbitraged the difference between being a military ally against, for

example, Russia and conducting a full-blown trade conflict with the United States. Restrictions on data exports have been part of the trade conflict, but now they could seriously harm our military and intelligence capabilities. Moreover, restrictions on U.S. intelligence collection hurt the Europeans themselves, especially as the United States shares unprecedented amounts of intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with Europeans.48

Europe is telling the United States to meet intelligence oversight standards that no European country meets. At the same time, exports of data to China are unexamined and (so far) free from legal challenges. That violates World Trade Organization agreements as an arbitrary and discriminatory data protection stan- dard. It is a betrayal by a nominally allied jurisdiction. European court rulings that struck down prior data privacy frameworks were grounded not in constitutional law but in a treaty among European nations. If the EU accepted an international agreement that data may flow to the United States under a more reasonable stan- dard than the one adopted by the court, that interpretation would be binding, at least as a gloss on the earlier treaty. The United States has never seriously pushed back against the EU; now is the time. An incoming President should ask for an immediate study of the implemen- tation of Executive Order 14086 and suspend any provisions that unduly burden intelligence collection. At the same time, in negotiations with the Europeans, the United States should make clear that the continued sharing of intelligence with EU member states depends on successful resolution of this issue within the first two years of a President’s term. It is time for a real solution, not the 30 years of stopgaps imposed by Brussels.

President’s Daily Brief (PDB). An incoming conservative President should make clear what the President’s Daily Brief is and is not. The PDB should be for the President specifically, with a much narrower distribution and addressing areas of strategic concern. During the transition, the future National Security Advisor, along with the DNI, should conduct a review of current PDB recipients and deter- mine which should remain recipients when the President’s term begins. Instead of being used as the statement of record for the agencies, the PDB often misses the areas of interest for Presidents and their senior advisers. The President should want the PDB to focus on providing the information needed for the often imperfect and complex decisions that a President needs to make, which should always be based on the best intelligence that can be gathered. Where consensus and agreement are possible, an IC-coordinated product is excellent, but insights provided by properly channeled dissent can lead a President to ask relevant ques- tions of his DNI and IC. A future DNI determines the PDB briefer based on recommendations made by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration (MI). His- torically, briefers have come from the CIA, but a future President and DNI should consider a primary briefer or a rotation of briefers from other IC elements. Addi- tionally, the entirety of the PDB staff and production should be located at ODNI. National Intelligence Council (NIC). The National Intelligence Council is the IC’s premier analytic organization and includes more than a dozen National Intelligence Officers (NIOs), each of whom leads the IC’s analysis within a regional (China, Russia, Iran, etc.) or functional (cyber, counterproliferation, economics, etc.) mission area. This includes authoring National Intelligence Estimates on major strategic issues with the entire IC, overseeing and deconflicting the annual analytic plans of each agency, and weighing in on day-to-day major analytical issues, sometimes individually (for example, by writing the NIC’s strategic memos or pro- viding detailed expert briefings to the President before major decisions). Historically part of the CIA, the NIC was reorganized into the ODNI as was the PDB. It retains the CIA’s objective analytic culture and is staffed primarily with CIA officers; however, as many as 25 percent of its NIOs over the decades have come from academia or the private sector, bringing in much-needed outside expertise to collate and understand intelligence with perspective and skills that are not necessarily nurtured within the IC. In recent years, there has been a greater emphasis on encouraging officers from other agencies—particularly the DIA, NSA, and FBI—to serve as NIOs or as their deputies.

To encourage greater analytic independence and debate, the incoming Admin- istration should require that non-CIA officers comprise at least 50 percent of the NIC’s membership and that the first-among-equals NIC Chairman is an outsider from one of the three major IC agencies with reporting responsibility to the PDDNI. Opening these senior analytic roles to the best analysts regardless of agency would also encourage the continued maturation of analytic cadres and tradecraft at those agencies and give them an equal voice in interagency analytical disputes, which in turn would give the President access to the best thinking and a variety of sources and perspectives from across the entire IC rather than from the CIA alone. IC Chief Information Officer. The Intelligence Community Chief Information Officer (ICCIO) directs and oversees all aspects of the classified IT budget for all of the IC’s 18 elements. As the DNI’s principal adviser for technology, the ICCIO must be well-versed in technology, acquisitions, operations, and intra-agency coop- eration to advance our technical prowess and simultaneously direct a bureaucracy that, left unchecked, will serve each element’s own preferences. To ensure that procured and implemented technology and policy reflect the Administration’s agenda, the ICCIO must have the support of the DNI and possess the ability to command cooperation between and promote interoperability across IC members. Because of the unique responsibilities entrusted to this position, incumbency has seesawed between political appointees and career civilians; due to its con- gressionally capped salary, the position is often filled by an SES-level member administratively detailed to support the DNI. At times, the ICCIO is incorrectly referred to as the ODNI CIO. By law, and to secure unbiased execution across all of the IC’s 18 elements, the same individual may not serve as ICCIO and ODNI CIO. They are two distinct positions.

Critical areas and IC IT portfolio priorities for the ICCIO include but are not limited to:

Recognized and uniform security access for people, systems, and capabilities to enable interoperability across IC elements; 5G/6G data transmission and network interoperability, which is vital to IC element operations; lArtificial intelligence and machine learning; lQuantum cryptography and post-quantum encryption (PQE); and l  Transparent accounting and allocation of IT investments across the IC, including commercial cloud computing and storage (C2E); Cybersecurity infrastructure where Biden Administration changes have realigned and reassigned management oversight and IT architecture responsibilities to NSA and DHS/CISA, conflicting with ICCIO- delineated roles.

An incoming Administration should appoint the ICCIO as a primary member of the DNI staff along with the ODNI General Counsel, IC Chief Financial Officer, and ODNI Chief Operating Officer.

The President-Elect should require immediate reviews of the progress in imple- menting post-quantum encryption at a minimum for IC and Defense systems but preferably throughout the government. The President’s National Security Memo- randum specifying “the goal of mitigating as much of the quantum risk as is feasible by 2035”49 needs to be revised in light of the magnitude of the threat. Accounting for the investment that will be needed to secure IT systems for national security should be a top priority.

ODNI, CIA, and IC Technology Issues. In recent years, the IC has had a mandate from multiple Administrations to advance technology needs for intelli- gence—needs that have seen massive changes as a result of such threats as China’s advancements in technology and data infrastructure. Many of the projects coming out of ODNI and CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) focus on expen- sive, AI-driven open-source work, but there is likely duplication of effort in areas where the private sector and entrepreneurs are already making progress.

Expand collaboration with partners. For too many decades, the IC and DOD have acquired and operated satellites independently. To improve their ability to meet the threat posed by China and Russia, the IC and DOD should:

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and S&T should focus primarily on challenging technology problems. Avoiding duplication of what is already being done well in the private sector in such areas as practical defense cyber intelligence and artificial intelligence research would help to focus the agen- cies on the complex shadow tasks at hand while simultaneously freeing limited resources for advancement in other areas.

President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and PIAB Intelligence Oversight Board. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) is charged with pro- viding the President with an independent source of advice on the IC’s effectiveness while offering insights into the IC’s future plans. The Board is meant to have access to all information needed to perform its functions and to have direct access to the President. The Intelligence Oversight Board is a standing committee within the PIAB. These entities should be tasked with giving independent, informed advice and opinion concerning major matters of national security focused on long-term, enduring issues central to advancing and protecting American interests. This should include taking a broader, deeper look at critical trends, developments, and their implications for U.S. national and economic security relying on unclassified and open-source information.

The Importance of Space. With China developing increasingly capable space and counterspace technologies and Russia taking more aggressive action in space, space has emerged as the latest warfighting domain. In response, the DNI cre- ated the Office of the Space Executive (OSX) in 2018 as an experiment to promote greater integration of IC space activities without incurring excessive overhead. The DNI mandated greater collaboration across the enterprise without adding personnel, altering authorities, and increasing budgets. The Space Executive’s design reflects the original design principles of the ODNI. The ODNI was explicitly not designed to be a departmental headquarters with com- mand and control of the 18 agencies’ vast bureaucracies. Rather, it was designed to be small and lightweight with a mission to coordinate and integrate the criti- cal activities of the IC’s 18 agencies without creating new bureaucracy. That goal should remain in force, and calls by outside entities or Congress to add new centers and layers should be rejected.

The Office of the Space Executive has been recognized as an effective governance model and has spawned similar efforts, including the Election Threats Executive, Economic and Threat Finance Executive, and Cyber Executive. With this in mind, the following initiatives should be pursued: 1. Explore new methods for better integrating our space assets, 2. Examine the possibility of joint programs, and 3. Fully utilize unique Title 10 and Title 50 authorities to execute space defense (and offense) strategies jointly. Additionally, the IC should support building international alliances with like-minded partners beyond the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing nations. Increasingly, potential allied nations (and their commercial companies) are developing innovative space capabilities to augment and strengthen the U.S. space defense and intelligence posture. l Refocus space-related intelligence collection. The IC has developed a space threats collection posture predicated on three assumptions:  1. The best information on developing space threats comes from collection against the adversaries’ military institutions on Earth, 2. There should be a clear dividing line between DOD’s intelligence activities and the IC’s, and 3. Only government-developed “exquisite” capabilities can inform threat analysis and decision-making effectively.

Developments by our adversaries and the emergence of a vibrant commercial space marketplace over the past decade have rendered all three assumptions false and even dangerous. The IC must therefore refocus and invest in methods that will enable it to characterize accurately the threats that already exist in space, not just on the ground; break down barriers to information sharing and collaboration with the DOD; and embrace commercially derived capabilities that can be adapted to a national security mission—all while emphasizing the need to protect critical supply chains and the cybersecurity needs that result from an increasingly government– commercial low Earth orbit.

Our nation’s economic and national security depends on being able to advance America’s leadership position in space, which is eroding in the face of increasing threats from adversaries and our own inaction.

AN UNFINISHED EXPERIMENT

The Intelligence Community, including specifically the role of the DNI and ODNI, is an unfinished experiment. The envisioned design principle was a conser- vative one: a small, network-centric model for enterprise coordination as opposed to a large monolithic bureaucracy like DHS. The ODNI, however, has reverted in some ways to a bureaucratic and hierarchical model characterized by limited effectiveness. Historically, the CIA has undercut the DNI and maintains primacy in the IC hierarchy, especially regarding the White House. An incoming conservative Pres- ident can right the ship and return the IC governance model to first principles by using a limited but empowered leadership and coordination design to serve the nation’s intelligence and national security needs while reclaiming the public trust with fiscal responsibility, political neutrality, personnel accountability, tech- nological prowess, and necessary human capital needed to counter the immense nation-state and asymmetrical threats facing our country.