6 U.S.C. § 121 — Information and Analysis

(a) Intelligence and Analysis. This section creates an Office of Intelligence and Analysis inside the Department of Homeland Security. (b) Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. (1) That office is led by an Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, appointed by the President with the Senate's approval. (2) This Under Secretary also serves as the Department's Chief Intelligence Officer. (c) Discharge of Responsibilities. The Secretary of Homeland Security must make sure the Department's information-analysis duties — including those listed in subsection (d) — are carried out through the Under Secretary. (d) The Secretary's Responsibilities. The Secretary is responsible for all of the following: (1) Getting, receiving, and analyzing law enforcement and intelligence information from federal agencies, state and local governments, and private companies, and combining it to support the Department's mission and the National Counterterrorism Center — in order to spot terrorist threats to the homeland, detect terrorism threats against the U.S., and understand those threats given the homeland's actual and potential weaknesses. (2) Fully assessing the vulnerabilities of the country's key resources and critical infrastructure, including judging the risk of specific kinds of terrorist attacks — how likely they'd succeed and how well various countermeasures would work. (3) Combining all relevant information, analysis, and vulnerability assessments — no matter who produced them — to set priorities for protective measures against terrorism and other threats, and to prepare finished intelligence products, both classified and unclassified, whenever that would help a state, local, or tribal government or a private company. (4) Making sure, under section 122, that the Department gets timely and efficient access to all the information it needs for these duties, including information from other federal agencies. (5) Reviewing information-sharing policies and procedures — including for homeland security, terrorism, and weapons-of-mass-destruction information — under the information sharing environment created by section 485, and recommending improvements. (6) Sharing analyzed information within the Department, with other federal agencies responsible for homeland security, and with state and local governments and private companies with similar responsibilities, to help deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks. (7) Working with the Director of National Intelligence and other intelligence, law enforcement, and government officials to set priorities and strategies for gathering terrorism-related information, including representing the Department in discussions about collection priorities. (8) Working with state and local governments and private companies to make sure information about terrorism threats gets exchanged properly. (9) Making sure that: material the Department receives is protected from unauthorized disclosure and used only for official work; and intelligence information is shared, kept, and passed along in ways consistent with the Director of National Intelligence's authority to protect intelligence sources and methods, and, where relevant, the Attorney General's authority over sensitive law-enforcement information. (10) Asking other federal, state, and local agencies and private companies for more information about terrorism threats or other assigned responsibilities, including through cooperative agreements. (11) Building and using, together with the Department's Chief Information Officer, a secure communications and information-technology system — including data-mining and other advanced analytical tools — to gather and analyze data, and to share what the Department learns. (12) Making sure, with the Chief Information Officer, that the Department's information databases and analytical tools work with each other and with other federal agencies' relevant databases, and that they handle information in ways that comply with federal privacy law. (13) Coordinating training and support for Department staff, other federal agencies, and state and local governments that share information with the Department or use its information, so that information gets identified and shared efficiently. (14) Coordinating, as appropriate, with the intelligence community and with federal, state, and local law enforcement and the private sector. (15) Providing intelligence and information analysis to support other parts of the Department. (16) Coordinating and improving integration among the Department's various intelligence components, including through strategic oversight of their intelligence work. (17) Setting the priorities, policies, processes, standards, guidelines, and procedures the Department's intelligence components use for collecting, processing, analyzing, and sharing intelligence, consistent with presidential direction and, where applicable, the Director of National Intelligence. (18) Setting up a structure and process to support the missions and goals of the Department's intelligence components. (19) Making sure that, whenever possible, the Department produces and shares unclassified reports based on publicly available ("open-source") information, and does so at the same time as it produces classified reports on the same or similar information. (20) Setting up an internal continuity-of-operations plan within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. (21) Based on the President's intelligence priorities and guidance from the Secretary and, as appropriate, the Director of National Intelligence: giving the heads of each Department intelligence component guidance for building their budgets, and presenting the Secretary with a recommended consolidated budget for all the Department's intelligence components, along with any comments those component heads have. (22) Carrying out any other related duties the Secretary assigns. (23) By no later than six months after December 23, 2016, conducting an intelligence-based review comparing the risks and consequences that electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) events pose to critical infrastructure, and sending Congress's homeland security and intelligence committees a recommended strategy to protect and prepare critical infrastructure against those threats — with updates at least every two years for the next six years. That strategy must be based on the findings of research required under section 195f, developed together with the relevant federal sector-specific agencies and sector coordinating councils for critical infrastructure, and informed by the review's findings where practical. It must be submitted unclassified, though it may include a classified annex. The Secretary may fold this strategy into a broader Department plan for protecting critical infrastructure from terrorism, cyberattacks, and other threats, as long as that broader plan still meets these requirements. (e) Staff. (1) The Secretary must give the Office of Intelligence and Analysis a staff of analysts with the right expertise and experience. (2) Some of these analysts can come from the private sector. (3) All analysts must hold security clearances appropriate to their work. (f) Detail of Personnel. (1) To help the Office do its work, personnel from certain other agencies can be "detailed" (temporarily assigned) to the Department to perform analysis and related duties. (2) Those agencies are: the Department of State, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and any other federal agency the President considers appropriate. (3) The Secretary and the head of the other agency can sign cooperative agreements to arrange these details. (4) The detail can be done on a reimbursable basis (the Department pays) or non-reimbursable basis (it doesn't). (g) Functions Transferred. Under subchapter XII, the following offices — along with their functions, staff, property, and liabilities — were transferred to the Secretary, to become part of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the Office of Infrastructure Protection: (1) the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (except its Computer Investigations and Operations Section), including related Attorney General functions; (2) the Defense Department's National Communications System, including related Secretary of Defense functions; (3) the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, including related Secretary of Commerce functions; (4) the Energy Department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, along with its energy security and assurance program, including related Secretary of Energy functions; and (5) the General Services Administration's Federal Computer Incident Response Center, including related GSA Administrator functions.