Inside the IC

Over his decade of service at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Rodney Petersen has had a front row seat to the evolving state of the cyber workforce across government, industry and academia. In his role as director of education and workforce at NIST’s Applied Cybersecurity Division, Petersen led efforts to standardize cyber workforce roles and better understand skills gaps that...

Tim Brennan, VP of technology policy and government relations at the Professional Services Council, joins me to discuss the latest legislative proposals to help streamline the gargantuan security clearance process. One of the priorities for PSC's members, which includes many cleared contractors, is developing a bigger bench of people with security clearances. "We are fishing in such a small pond r...

Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, has reached an inflection point in the IC. Several agencies in recent years have published strategies aimed at better harnessing OSINT. Now, they're embarking on new initiatives to improve data collection and management, train the workforce, and share best practices across the community. But a multitude of challenges remain, including skills gaps, data siloes, b...

The widespread layoffs and resignations unfolding across the federal government represent a prime opportunity for foreign spy agencies. In an April bulletin, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned that foreign intelligence organizations are targeting current and former U.S. government employees by posing as consulting firms, corporate headhunters and other job opportunities. M...

Cortney Weinbaum, a senior management scientist at RAND, joins the show to discuss her recent paper, “Intelligence officers have an ethical responsibility to use tradecraft.” Countless professional disciplines have a code of ethics. But such a code does not exist for the intelligence community. Weinbaum argues that intelligence officers have an ethical responsibility to use the right tools and met...

The Intelligence and National Security Alliance has a slate of recommendations for the incoming Trump administration. They touch on how the IC could make progress on hiring, personnel vetting (security clearances), AI skills and open source intelligence, among other areas. Inside the IC spoke with John Doyon, INSA's executive vice president, to dig into the suggestions ahead of the Jan. 20 transit...

The intelligence community has laid out new priorities for the cloud, AI, cybersecurity and more in a new "Information Technology Roadmap" released in late May. The IC's Chief Information Officer, Adele Merritt, joined the show to explain the goals of the new strategy. "This roadmap really provides a unified vision for where the IC needs to go over the next five years," Merritt told me. See Privac...

On the heels of a new intelligence community-wide open-source intelligence strategy . . . the State Department now has its own OSINT strategy. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) uses OSINT to inform U.S. diplomacy, a unique role in the intelligence community. And one of the big goals of the new strategy is to better serve U.S. diplomats across the world by generating more unclassified a...

Leaders of top U.S. intelligence agencies have signed onto a plan to centralize and take better advantage of open source intelligence, or OSINT. The new OSINT strategy aims to make open-source an “the INT of first resort.” Those words, in the title of the strategy, are a tacit recognition that spy agencies have traditionally favored gaining intelligence from highly secretive sources – human intell...

Women make up about 40% of the intelligence community's workforce, a percentage that ranks behind both federal workforce and civilian labor benchmarks. That's according to the latest demographics report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And women are even more underrepresented in the leadership ranks throughout the IC. But agencies aren't ignoring the issue. The National Se...

The Standard Form-86, a long-used questionnaire for government positions requiring security clearance, is set to be phased out after the White House Office of Management and Budget approved a new form replacing the SF-86 and several other legacy forms. I spoke with John Berry, a security clearance attorney at Berry and Berry PLLC law firm, about some of the big changes new "Personnel Vetting Quest...

The Defense Intelligence Agency runs the federal government's top-secret IT network. DIA is in the middle of a major modernization of that network. And in addition to running new routers and switches, DIA also wants to upgrade to more network automation and help lay the groundwork for the intelligence community to leverage AI. Cybersecurity is also essential, both to defend against outside hackers...

More than three years ago, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency launched a “neurodiversity” hiring pilot program. The idea was to make it easier to recruit individuals with differences in brain functioning, such as people with autism, who could contribute to the mission, but may have difficulty navigating the traditional hiring process and workplace environment. Now, NGA is looking to build...

Gen Z , or those born between the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s , will likely comprise at least one-quarter of the global workforce by 2025. In order to tap into that younger generation of talent, U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to be more flexible with their hiring and retention practices. For an in-depth discussion on the IC’s workforce strategies, I spoke with Cynthia Snyder, the assis...

The vast majority of employees across the intelligence community work out of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or "SCIFs." These are essentially highly protected office spaces with restrictive rules, including a ban on cell phones and other devices. The Intelligence and National Security Agency's latest white paper, "Reimagining the SCIF Life," considers how spy agencies could make l...

The Army is making a strong push into open source intelligence. Earlier this year, the Army published its first OSINT strategy. The service's goal is to "professionalize" its OSINT workforce and use OSINT as an intelligence discipline "of first resort," Lt. Gen. Laura Potter, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, tells me in this week's show. Also joining the show is Dennis Eger, the...

The personnel vetting process is a major drag on the government's hiring ambitions. It can often leave candidates confused and in the dark, even before they start the lengthy background investigation process. So what if the government focused more on the "candidate experience," similar to the ever increasing focus on "customer experience" at many agencies? A new RAND report (link below) takes an e...

In a June 30 memo, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed Pentagon officials to take a range of actions to tighten access to classified information. The directive stems from a review of security procedures Austin ordered earlier this spring in reaction to the Discord leaks, allegedly by 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira. What do these new actions mean for security clearance applica...

For this episode, I speak with Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, about NPEC's influential paper, "Over-classification: How Bad Is It, What’s the Fix?" The over-classification of national security information has been a long simmering issue in Washington policy circles. But that debate was cast into the spotlight after 21-year-old Air National Guard...

A new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency project is looking to use psychology to thwart would-be hackers. Many cyber attacks these days use basic human psychology to get people to click on a link, for example, as part of a "phishing" exploit. But IARPA thinks it can flip that paradigm on its head and embed the "cognitive biases" of hackers into network defenses. For an overview of the...

The Defense Intelligence Agency is in the early stages of making major upgrades to the federal government's top-secret network, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System (JWICS). DIA's "customers" - other federal agencies and military units -- increasingly want high-bandwidth, low latency digital services to be a part of JWICS. So DIA will be "expanding the highway" of JWICS by embeddi...

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's "Tearline" project is a unique "open source" endeavor in the intelligence community. And its efforts aren't going unnoticed: Tearline recently won the inaugural "OSINT Unit of the Year" award from the OSINT Foundation. I spoke with Chris Rasmussen, the Tearline's founder and program manager, about the project's origins, what it's been up to lately, and...

Compensation for individuals with security clearances increased by 7% in 2022. More than half of all cleared workers now make six figures, according to ClearanceJobs' annual Security Clearance Compensation Report. I spoke with ClearanceJobs President Evan Lesser and Senior Editor Jill Hamilton about the latest report, which also shows an uptick in remote and hybrid work opportunities for cleared t...

The National Security Agency's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center opened nearly two years ago to help the defense industrial base and other critical organizations better secure their networks. The organization works with a couple hundred of companies today, and it wants to scale that to "thousands" this year, according to Kristina Walter, chief of DIB defense at the center, my guest for this week'...