The intelligence mission of the Homeland Security Department should mainly avoid areas of overlap with already-established intelligence community efforts to pursue terrorists, says a paper from the Aspen Institute homeland security group.

The group, which is chaired by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, released a Jan. 18 paper exhorting DHS to build "a new analytic foundation that emphasizes data, analytic questions, and customer groups that are not the focus for other agencies." Group members presented it before a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

DHS should put more resources to analysis that helps the private sector determine how to mitigate threats to critical infrastructure, for example, than to "all-source analysis of general threats" and general terrorist trends, the paper says.

DHS should also focus on creating intelligence products that can be distributed to consumers with lower classification ratings--especially unclassified or "for official use only" products, the paper says. That would also allow for methods of distribution almost unknown in the federal intelligence community, such as via phone trees and mobile devices.

A change in the threat landscape to more localized threats also creates the likelihood that state and local partners will generate the information necessary to understanding it--a development that DHS might take account of through decentralization of its analytic workforce into partnerships with state and local agencies, the paper says.

The needs of different private sector entities should also drive analytic product creation at DHS, it adds.

Implementing proposed changes would require new training, the paper allows, since they would "reflect a way of doing business that is fundamentally different than the business practices taught at agencies that have focused historically on foreign intelligence."

For more:
- download the paper, "Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission" (.pdf)

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