Inside the IC

The theme of this September’s National Insider Threat Awareness Month is is "critical thinking in digital spaces" I spoke with Rebecca Morgan, deputy director of the National Insider Threat Task Force, about how new forms of social engineering, misinformation and phishing are increasingly being used to target the federal workforce and others.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is among the many federal offices looking to shore up the security of U.S. supply chains. Jeanette McMillian is the NSCS's assistant director of supply chain and cyber. "Everything from software to semiconductors, pipelines to peanut butter, malware to meat packing, we have seen it all with regards to how global supply chains have impacted our lives," McMillian told me in today's show.

The National Background Investigations Services program, or NBIS, has been described as the "lynchpin" to the federal personnel vetting reform efforts. The massive software project is aimed at both replacing legacy IT systems with modern functionality, institutionalizing new processes like continuous vetting, and bringing many personnel vetting systems together into one IT environment. To get the latest on the program's developments, I spoke with Jeff Smith, the executive program manager for NBIS at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

The zero trust security concept has been around for more than a decade, but it's turned into a major buzzword in recent years. The federal government now has a zero trust strategy. The National Security Agency is also embracing the concept. I spoke with Kevin Bingham, the zero trust lead at the NSA, about what this whole zero trust thing really means.

Open source intelligence, or OSINT, is often treated as an afterthought in the U.S. intelligence community compared to other forms of intel. Now, a group of former intelligence leaders are trying to change that. They are forming a new OSINT Foundation to help elevate the tradecraft, establish standards, and build a community around open source. I spoke with two of the foundation's leaders, Barbara Alexander and Eliot Jardines.

This episode features part two of an interview with Larry Hanauer, vice president for policy at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Larry discusses INSA's ideas for how the intel community can improve how it recruits and clears people with foreign connections.

The security clearance process often poses a challenge for both government and industry when they want to move people around and bring new personnel onboard. That's especially true for the highest levels of clearance, where polygraph requirements and other inconsistent policies can bog things down for weeks and months. To break down the issue, I spoke with Larry Hanauer, the vice president for policy at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, and Greg Torres, the director of personnel security at Booz Allen Hamilton, about INSA's new paper, "Improving Security Clearance Mobility: How to Save Time and Resources and Enhance Mission Outcomes."

Trusted Workforce 2.0 is the government's wholesale reform of the security clearance process. The idea is to make it easier for employees to move in and around government and industry, while also improving security. For more, I spoke with Heather Green, the assistant director of vetting risk operations at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. DCSA handles security clearance investigations for the vast majority of government, and it's taking a lead role in implementing Trusted Workforce 2.0.

Brett Holmgren is the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, is unique in that it delivers intelligence analysis to advance diplomacy. And that principle has been central to the intelligence community’s efforts to downgrade and in some cases declassify intelligence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to share it with partners and allies. We talked to Holmgren about INR's history, its role during the conflict in Ukraine, and INR’s new strategic plan.

Nancy Morgan spent the last three years as the intelligence community's chief data officer. In that time, the amount of information both collected and produced by intelligence agencies has grown exponentially. The IC is now rewriting its 2017 data strategy to help guide spy agencies in all aspects of how they use an ever growing amount of data. Morgan retired at the end of April, but first, she sat down with Justin Doubleday, as well as Jory Heckman, host of "All About Data," to discuss the IC's evolving data strategy, and why she thinks data isn't just a field for highly trained data scientists.