How much cooperation is there between government agencies specifically CIA FBI NSA and DHS?

Answer 1

While the FBI, NSA ad CIA communicate, maintain cooperatives inter-agency briefings, and report to both the legislative branch and executive branch, each has a different mission to fulfill and, as such, is hesitant to share information or resources with other agencies, who have their own agendae at heart. Over all of these is the Dept. of Homeland Security, created as an umbrella agency, with one of its critical mission goals to be the increasing of inter-angency communications and collaboration. This has generated luke-warm results at best. DHS, an omnibus operation -- is huge in scope, for instance including management or at least oversight or coordination of agencies as diverse as local sheriff and police departments, the remnants of the Border patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), NEMA, and the aforesaid alphabet agencies, just to name a very few. Just one minor concern is the level of security clearances required by the myriad personnel. While some agencies and tasks require compartmentalized clearances that are fundamentlaly above Top Secret, other agencies require personnel cleared only at the new, non-legal, "Law Enforcement Proprietary" clearances for instance -- or even without a formal clearance at all. As even a "Confidential" clearance can cost $50,000 per person or more (depending), it's beyond practicality to imagine that coordinating the various levels of clearance, and the various classifications of the data is truly possible. And that's just one example. And so, agencies who really do have a need to maintain operational security have a natural reticence to share info with the DHS. And the end result is that a lot of information remains inter-agency -- which many not really be a bad thing. It's actually quite rare that the ball gets dropped. Note that it didn't really make much of a difference in 9/11.