b'How to know whether you want to work abroad most of your career or only occasionally? How to distinguish between a career in government service and one in the private sector, even if both are based overseas? What if you dont want to deal with foreigners but you do want to work in the homeland security or national security arena? The subject of intelligence is complex. In addressing national security decision-making, of which intelligence is a significant component, especially today with all the advancements seen in technology, Avril Haines, current Director of National Intelligence said: The DNI must also, in my view, set a strategic vision for the work of the Intelligence Community that looks beyond the immediate horizon to ensure we are well postured to address developing threats and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise promoting national resilience, innovation, competitiveness and shared prosperity. This means ensuring that the Intelligence Community has the capacity to understand, warn, protect and defend the United States against the threats we face. 1 The White House, Congress, the media and the American people expect the Intelligence Community to forewarn of impending threats and long-term strategic challenges. Failure to do so elicits almost instantaneous criticism of an intelligence failure. What are often under-appreciated are the difficulties in collecting, verifying, processing, collating, and analyzing all the information that is available to produce useful intelligence.Information is anything that can be known, regardless of how it is discovered. Intelligence refers to information that meets the stated or unstated needs of policy makers and has been collected, processed, and narrowed to meet those needs. 2 Information is essential to the intelligence process. Intelligence, on the other hand, is not simply an amalgam of collected information. It is instead the result of taking information relevant to a specific issue and subjecting it to a process of integration, evaluation, and analysis with the specific purpose of projecting future events and actions, and estimating and predicting outcomes. 3 1Avril Haines, On the Nomination of Avril D. Haines To Be Director of National Intelligence ,United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2021).2 Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 4th Ed. (2009), Washington DC, CQ Press, p. 9. 3Don McDowell, Strategic Intelligence: A Handbook for Practitioners, Managers, and Users, Revised Edition (2009), Lanham, MD, The Scarecrow Press, p. 53. 6'