Individual User Licenses for Counterintelligence Division

The FBI serves as the primary U.S. counterintelligence component that provides intelligence, analysis, mitigation, and monitoring in support of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is an interagency committee that reviews foreign purchases of, and investments in, US companies to identify threats to US national security. This work is done by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, China Intelligence Section, Foreign Investment Unit (FIU) who works to identify possible threats to US national security resulting from foreign investment. FIU reviews CFIUS filings and other related business transactions to identify the threat to US national security and to protect and preserve FBI equities that may be affected by these transactions. The CFIUS statute authorizes that transactions not filed with CFIUS may be reviewed for their impact on national security and brought to the attention of CFIUS if warranted. This referral process is utilized by FIU’s Non-Notified Team (NN), who primarily relies on commercially available financial data to drive its identification of transactions. FIU requires commercial databases similar to what Wall Street investment banking firms use to assist with this mission. FIU further requires a commercial database which specializes in private equity (PE), venture capital (VC), and special acquisition companies (SPACs) as well as other types of investments and funding methods. PEs, VCs, and SPACs have emerged in the last five years as a funding mechanism for larger scaling of US high technology firms and other high profile industries to bring liquidity for creation, development, and to market – expanding the universe of investments that may pose a national security threat. As such, FIU requires unlimited data access to a commercial financial database that provides company screening capabilities, downloadable financial transaction data, market research, and industry and sector specific financial data in order to conduct company and person research on potential internal FBI acquisitions; analytical research to CFIUS and Team Telecom transactions; and targeting and exploitation of transactions in order to support the identification of non-notified transactions.