You are a counterintelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assigned to the Critical Technology Protection Division. Your division is responsible for providing counterintelligence support to research, development, and acquisition (RDA) missions. To accomplish this mission, your team has been asked to provide a counterintelligence threat briefing to a major defense contractor responsible for the research and development of critical U.S. defense technology. The purpose of this report is to help prevent foreign threats from acquiring U.S. critical program information to exploit and degrade its combat effectiveness and technical superiority.

Group Portion (1)

For this assignment, using the Small Group Discussion Board, you must review and discuss counterintelligence collection as well as the current list of U.S. critical technologies with your group.

• As a group, do the following: 
  • Discuss counterintelligence collection methods.
    • Consider sources, techniques, and common operating pictures.
  • Examine the list of U.S. critical technologies.
    • A current list of critical technologies can be found within your Phase 3 Web resource titled Military Critical Technologies List.
  • Come to a group consensus, and select 1 technology from the list that will be examined in this assignment from a counterintelligence perspective.

Individual Portion

Once your group has chosen a piece of critical technology, each member of the group must prepare a counterintelligence threat assessment of 1,000-1,200 words about the group's selected technology.

• Using the information from the course materials, the textbook, outside research, and the small group discussion, provide a threat assessment introduction on counterintelligence collection.
  • What methods and techniques are used in counterintelligence collection? Explain.
  • What are common sources for counterintelligence? Explain.
• Using the information from the course materials, the textbook, outside research, and the small group discussion, draft the body of your counterintelligence threat assessment about the selected technology. The assessment should include the following sections:
  • A description and brief summary of the technology
  • Applications for which the technology is used
  • Which organizations use this piece of technology
  • Who develops or manufactures this technology
  • Which foreign adversaries are potentially interested in this technology
  • Methods this adversary may use to acquire this technology
  • Implications if this technology were to be compromised
  • Possible vulnerabilities for protecting this technology
  • Recommendations to safeguard this technology
• Compile your responses in your final individual threat assessment, and submit the file.

Group Portion (2)

For the second group portion of this assignment, you must discuss, as a group, your findings from your threat assessment and develop a final collective counterintelligence threat briefing for the critical technology your group has chosen.

• Evaluate the individual threat assessments of your group members.
• Confer with your group, and select the strongest elements of the individual assessments.
  • There must be at least 1 section used from each group member.
• Determine, as a group, how the final document will be formatted, organized, and compiled.
• Complete the final collective threat assessment according to the agreed-upon guidelines, and submit the file to your instructor.
• Be sure to reference all sources using APA style.
• Be sure to include in text quotation.