ABSTRACT
The National Security Act of 1947 provides that the intelligence organizations of the government correlate and evaluate intelligence—a provision that is accepted as the legislative charter for intelligence analysis. Gathering and understanding information about other nations is the central purpose of National Intelligence. The available information must be assembled, sifted, weighed, and appraised as a basis for judgments about the present state of affairs and about what the future may hold. In the early post-war days following creation of the new national intelligence structure, the members of the US Intelligence Community undertook to assemble and organize an encyclopedic collection of information. The collectors in the field are expected to make preliminary judgments and to report immediately to higher echelons for further analysis. An unencrypted communication—a plain language transmission—can present the same substantive questions as those faced in Human intelligence collection, so far as judgments of significance are concerned.
