"....the Office of Health Affairs, within DHS, is leading the National Biosurveillance Integration Center, or NBIC, partnership..... NBIC brings together biological information from various Federal partners and open sources to develop an integrated picture of biological risks. The President has called for a "timely response to mitigate the consequences of a biological weapons attack". Our mission was initially established through Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs) 9 and 10. It was also recently codified in title XI of P.L. 110-53, Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. "NBIC seeks to provide information to allow early recognition of biological events of national concern, both natural and man-made, to make a timely response possible. No other place in government serves to integrate this information from across the spectrum of public and private, domestic and international, open or protected sources. The three?component parts of NBIC are: (1) A robust information management system capable of handling large quantities of structured and unstructured information; (2) A corps of highly-trained subject matter experts and analysts; and (3) A clear establishment of a culture of cooperation, trust and mutual support across the Federal government and other partners.... "To provide additional value to our partners, DHS has the advantage of its access to threat information, which, when integrated with surveillance of health data and disease outbreak trends may provide early warning of a biological attack. To accomplish this, fused information products and other patterns and trends developed from biosurveillance sources are provided to our agency partner, the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, for incorporation with intelligence analysis products. When appropriate, the product can be forwarded to the wider Intelligence Community and pertinent threat analysis information added for return to the Center for further interagency dissemination. This final process of actionable information preparation fuses biosurveillance patterns and trends with threat information. The completed products can then be provided to the National Operations Center (NOC) for inclusion in the Common Operating Picture (COP). This distribution closes the loop by providing biosurveillance situational awareness back to NBIC partner agencies and other organizations. "By integrating and fusing this large amount of available information we can then begin to develop a base-line against which we can recognize anomalies and changes of significance. NBIC seeks to identify patterns and trends, which in combination with threat analysis provide the situational awareness our partners need to execute their mission". (DHS, Testimony of Dr. Kimothy Smith National Biosurveillance Integration Center, October 4, 2007)