CSIS: The Future of Information Sharing and the ISE

Yesterday, the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) hosted an impressive information sharing conference, Information Sharing: Adapting and Improving an Expanded ISE. The conference featured many great speakers from the information sharing and safeguarding community, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ISE Program Manager Kshemendra Paul, and other prominent officials from the White House, Defense Intelligence Agency, General Services Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and others.

Director Clapper
In his keynote address, Director Clapper discussed the challenges facing the information sharing and safeguarding community, the roles of ODNI and PM-ISE, and our vision for the future. He also highlighted six key principles of intelligence sharing:

• Integration is essential. Our goal is a more secure nation due to a fully integrated intelligence community.
• Intelligence requires some standardization. For example, we are pursuing efficiency in IT architecture with technology like cloud computing.
• In the intelligence community, protecting privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties is paramount. Protecting the rights of Americans is core to our information sharing efforts.
• Sharing and safeguarding must be done in tandem. Our goal is to increase both information sharing and information protection.
• We have to embrace common operating models and shared services. This requires greater integration both horizontally across the intelligence community and vertically across the private sector and other allies.
• The challenges we face aren’t technical as much as they are about ensuring right policies and governance. The ODNI is developing and coordinating a plan for managing the intelligence community.

Panel Discussions
Throughout the day, speakers discussed the challenges of increasing both information sharing and safeguarding together in the future, how PM-ISE and its mission partners can address these challenges, and what the future holds for expanded information sharing.

Kshemendra Paul joined a panel discussion about information sharing and the future of the ISE with mission partners from the White House and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Mr. Paul focused on integration and the better use of standards as well as how the ISE has evolved over time. He also described a few examples of how the ISE is scaling up, including featuring the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI) and premiering an NSI training video for the audience.

We would like to continue the conversation and are seeking your input on our way forward. There are many ways to get involved and share your feedback about our information sharing and safeguarding mission. Here are a few ways you can make your voice heard – ISE Program Manager Kshemendra Paul has promised to read and consider all comments:

• Continue to monitor the ISE Blog - we will post frequent updates about the ISE and follow ups from the CSIS discussions. Please comment as yourself or anonymously below!
• Sign up for email alerts about ISE activities and the National Strategy.
• Tweet your comments: we’re on Twitter @shareandprotect.

We appreciate your interest in information sharing and the ISE. Hopefully you were able to attend this event, but if not, check out our Media Center for news coverage as well as audio and video from the event.