6 U.S.C. § 482 — Facilitating homeland security information sharing procedures

(a) Procedures for determining extent of sharing. (1) The President must create and put in place procedures for relevant federal agencies to: (A) share relevant, appropriate homeland^* security information with other federal agencies (including the Department^*) and with appropriate state and local personnel; (B) figure out and protect homeland security information that is sensitive but not classified; and (C) for information that is classified, decide whether, how, and how much of it to remove before sharing, and decide which personnel may receive it once it is removed. (2) The President must make sure these procedures apply to every agency^* of the federal government. (3) These procedures cannot change the substantive rules for classifying and safeguarding classified information. (4) These procedures cannot change the requirements and authorities that protect intelligence sources and methods.

(b) Procedures for sharing of homeland security information. (1) Under procedures the President prescribes, all appropriate agencies, including the intelligence community, must share homeland security information — through information-sharing systems — with federal agencies and appropriate state and local personnel, to the extent subsection (a) allows, together with assessments of how credible the information is. (2) Each information-sharing system used for this must: (A) be able to transmit unclassified or classified information, even though the procedures and recipients for each may differ; (B) be able to restrict delivery of information to specific subgroups based on geographic location, type of organization, a recipient's position within an organization, or a recipient's need to know; (C) be set up to allow efficient and effective information sharing; and (D) be accessible to appropriate state and local personnel. (3) The procedures must set conditions on the use of information shared under paragraph (1), to: (A) limit re-sharing of the information so it isn't used for an unauthorized purpose; (B) keep the information secure and confidential; (C) protect the constitutional and statutory rights of people the information is about; and (D) keep the data accurate by promptly removing and destroying outdated or wrong names and information. (4) To the greatest extent practical, the procedures must make sure the information-sharing systems used include existing systems, such as the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, the Regional Information Sharing System, and the FBI's Terrorist Threat Warning System. (5) Every appropriate federal agency, as the President determines, must have access to each information-sharing system used under paragraph (1), and so must have access to all information shared through it, as appropriate. (6) The procedures must make sure appropriate state and local personnel are authorized to use these information-sharing systems to: (A) access information shared with them; and (B) share, with others who have access to the systems, their own jurisdiction's homeland security information, marked as related to potential terrorist activity. (7) Under procedures the Director of Central Intelligence and the Attorney General jointly prescribe, each appropriate federal agency the President determines must review the information shared under paragraph (6) and integrate it with existing intelligence.

(c) Sharing of classified and sensitive but unclassified information with state and local personnel. (1) The President must prescribe procedures letting federal agencies share, to the extent the President considers necessary, homeland security information that remains classified or otherwise protected even after the determinations made under subsection (a). (2) It is the sense of Congress that these procedures may include one or more of: (A) carrying out security-clearance investigations for appropriate state and local personnel; (B) for information that is sensitive but unclassified, entering into nondisclosure agreements with appropriate state and local personnel; and (C) increasing the use of information-sharing partnerships involving state and local personnel, such as the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Department of Justice's Anti-Terrorism Task Forces, and regional Terrorism Early Warning Groups. (3)(A) The Secretary^* must set up a program to give appropriate training to the officials described in subparagraph (B), to help them: (i) identify sources of potential terrorist threats, using methods the Secretary decides are appropriate; (ii) report information about potential terrorist threats to the right federal agencies, in the right form and manner; (iii) make sure all reported information is systematically submitted to and passed on by the Department for use by appropriate federal agencies; and (iv) understand the intelligence community's mission and roles, to promote more effective information sharing among federal, state, and local officials and private-sector representatives to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States. (B) The officials covered are officials of state and local government^* agencies, and representatives of private-sector entities, with responsibilities for overseeing or managing first responders, counterterrorism activities, or critical infrastructure^*. (C) The Secretary must consult with the Attorney General to make sure this training program does not duplicate the training program set up under section 908 of the USA PATRIOT Act. (D) The Secretary must carry out this training program in consultation with the Director of Central Intelligence and the Attorney General.

(d) Responsible officials. For each affected federal agency, the head of that agency must designate an official to administer this chapter for that agency.

(e) Federal control of information. Information a state or local government gets from a federal agency under this section stays under the federal agency's control, and a state or local law that would otherwise authorize or require that government to disclose the information does not apply to it.

(f) Definitions. (1) "Homeland security information" means information held by a federal, state, or local agency that: (A) relates to the threat of terrorist activity; (B) relates to the ability to prevent, interdict, or disrupt terrorist activity; (C) would improve identifying or investigating a suspected terrorist or terrorist organization; or (D) would improve the response to a terrorist act. (2) "Intelligence community" has the meaning given that term in section 3003(4) of title 50. (3) "State and local personnel" means people involved in preventing, preparing for, or responding to a terrorist attack, including: (A) state governors, mayors, and other locally elected officials; (B) state and local law enforcement personnel and firefighters; (C) public health and medical professionals; (D) regional, state, and local emergency^*-management agency personnel, including state adjutant generals; (E) other appropriate emergency-response agency personnel; and (F) employees of private-sector entities that affect critical infrastructure, cyber, economic, or public health security, if the federal government designates them under this section's procedures. (4) "State" includes the District of Columbia and any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States.

(g) Construction. Nothing in this chapter authorizes any federal department, bureau, agency, officer, or employee to request, receive, or transmit to any other government entity or personnel — including a state or local entity or personnel otherwise authorized under this chapter to receive homeland security information — any information the federal government collected solely for statistical purposes, if doing so would violate another law about keeping that information confidential.