really became the primary focus of the Reagan administration or successor administrations, each of these paid significant attention to the issue and produced many important documents that shed light on the policy choices faced today. Terrorism has been the subject of numerous presidential and Defense Department directives as well as executive orders. Terrorist groups and terrorist acts have been the focus of reports by both executive branch agencies (for example, the State Department, CIA, and FBI) as well as Congressional bodies – including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Congressional Research Service. The General Accounting Office has also produced several dozen reports evaluating the U.S. government's ability to prevent or mitigate terrorist strikes ... The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence produces analytic products that can help identify terrorist groups, their structure, and plans. These may benefit from signals intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA), from imagery intelligence from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the Department of the Treasury, and from other specialized agencies. Regular research The Department of State, with CIA assistance, prepares an annual volume called Patterns in Terrorism. FBI reporting is more irregular, but does do problem descriptions as well as specific reports. While the Congressional Research Service technically is prohibited from making its reports automatically available to the public, several legislative efforts are underway to change this, and in practice, its reports are often Internet-accessible within a few days of issue, typically on the Federation of American Scientists website. Virtual station and cross-functional team research While the initial implementation, the Bin Laden Issue Station, did not work well, there has been an Intelligence Community effort to avoid the problems of stovepiping, especially where it involves lack of communication between analysts and operators. There is a continuing controversy about ensuring Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) information gets to analysts; the FBI culture has been extremely decentralized, so "dots to be connected" in two field offices were not shared; this was particularly relevant in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The overall problems of stovepiping and encouraging cross-functional teams, in the context of terrorism, has been addressed by, among other groups, the House Intelligence Committee. One of their chief recommendations was: FBI's main problem going forward is to overcome its information sharing failures. "Ensuring adequate information sharing" should be communicated throughout the Bureau