Intelligence Community

The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is a coalition of agencies and organizations that work both independently and collaboratively to gather information and produce the intelligence necessary to conduct foreign relations while addressing increasingly different and more diverse national security challenges. The mission objectives of the IC are strategic intelligence, anticipatory intelligence, sustained operations, cyber intelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence. The IC is responsible for supplying accurate and useful information to national security decision makers and policymakers by converting acquired information into clear and comprehensible intelligence to satisfy national, transnational, and military requirements and needs. Readers of this entry will gain an understanding of how each of the various units contributes to the IC, the surveillance techniques utilized by the IC, and its global partnerships.