Challenges the Intelligence Community Faces

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The notion of respecting existing civil liberties remains one of the intelligence community’s primary challenges in supporting Homeland Security. Intelligence is essential in advancing and protecting countries, but it is crucial to avoid violating the present fundamental rights and freedoms. The primary purpose of establishing the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency (CLPT) was to oversee and advise how the intelligence community operates. Besides, the IC must cope with the threat of a leak of insider communications to the public, which may be confidential. An example of this situation occurred when Edward Snowden, a sub-contractor, leaked personal information from the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden’s action might have had a long-lasting and irreversible outcome to the NSA’s capability to detect and respond to threats likely to impact the nation (Litt, 2016). Therefore, the intelligence community must cope with employees who may or not comprehend the mission’s objectives, leading to erroneous impressions of the government efforts. Because of his actions, some citizens consider Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed how the government violated civil liberties in its surveillance programs. Arguably, if you scrutinize some of the government’s plans, it is evident why some citizens and Snowden were concerned with the invasion of their privacy. A program known as Bullrun grants agents the ability to crack HTTPS, SSL, and many other standard encryption methods used to safeguard information from Facebook messages, passwords, and bank statements (Pulver, 2017). Besides, the government uses programs that target the individual they are looking for and exposes innocent bystanders the suspect may have been in contact with or knows.
Today, the intelligence community field faces new challenges. Examples of challenges include the infringement of civil liberties, theft of citizens’ privacy, and government supervision of all communication devices, such as mobile phones and the internet. For example, following the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence community had to create a secure intelligence system abroad and at home without destroying the existing strategies for collecting intelligence or infringing on civil liberties. Notably, this was challenging to assess because there was no framework documenting how the IC agencies would adopt the new tasks since were no fusion centers allocated u...