“The foundation of a counter-insider threat program needs to start with recognizing there is a person at the other end,” says Keith Lowry, former Chief of Staff to the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Human Intelligence, Counterintelligence and Security at the Pentagon in this article on ZDNet: Fighting the person should be cybersecurity best practice When…
The psychology and methodology of Brian Regan, an Air Force master sergeant turned TRW government contractor working at the NRO who tried to sell classified secrets to multiple countries. This article was published in The Guardian in October 2016: . . . . Whatever nostalgia he might have felt for his old school was tinged with…
The psychology of Gregory Allen Justice, a Boeing satellite engineer with a top secret security clearance passed over for promotion. This article appeared in the Daily Beast in August 2016: . . . . Among those satellites were sensitive military systems that Justice himself had worked on at Boeing for more than 15 years. Concealed in…
The psychology of Benedict Arnold. This article appeared in the May 2016 Smithsonian magazine: He was short, solidly built (one acquaintance remembered that “there wasn’t any wasted timber in him”) and blessed with almost superhuman energy and endurance. He was handsome and charismatic, with black hair, gray eyes and an aquiline nose, and he carried himself with the…
This excellent article was written by Anthony N. Bishop and published in CSO (Chief Security Officer) magazine in September 2016: The best IT security is not enough to protect against the determined insider The most important lesson American businesses can learn from the Montes case is that IT security measures will not be enough to prevent…
The following article by John Irvin appeared under the title NOIR: Neue Strategien zur Erkennung von Insiderspionen in Vol.10, Nr.1/2016 of the Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies [JIPSS], published by the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies [ACIPSS].[1] ACIPSS was founded at the University of Graz, Austria, in 2004, “in order…
The question “why didn’t you do it?” can be asked of those millions of individuals who possess security clearances and who have access to sensitive information who nevertheless have not engaged in insider espionage. Their names are immediately recognizable to most of the public: Robert Hannsen, Aldrich Ames, John Walker, Julius Rosenberg, Benedict Arnold …
Examining the critical Spy-Handler relationship and why a NOIR can alter it to our advantage and create the opportunity for predomination By John Irvin “There are more spies in the United States today from foreign nation states than at any time in our history — including the Cold War,” stated former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.)…
Dr. David Charney’s proposed National Office for Intelligence Reconciliation (NOIR) was designed to better manage the problem of insider threat and insider spying. One criticism of NOIR has been that it would not work for all insider spies. However, it must be pointed out that it was never claimed to be one hundred percent effective.…
The one constant is the human mind, the way we think, which is ultimately the source of all acts of espionage. By John Irvin A friend drove up in the classic 1960s sports car he has just purchased at considerable expense to both his personal finances and his marital relationship. It was a genuinely beautiful…
By John Irvin NOIR Team On the face of it, insider espionage and terrorism would seem to have little in common. The insider spy and his or her handler (traditionally, but not necessarily, a foreign intelligence service) strive to keep their activities as hidden as possible, while the definitive purpose of all terrorism is to…
Despite the use of increasingly advanced technical means, the deception, duplicity, and betrayal of espionage are a human problem that requires a human solution. By John Irvin, NOIR Team In all, around 3.6 million individuals were impacted by two breaches of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) electronic databases, one announced in June 2015 and the second…
By John Irvin NOIR Team The first part of this discussion [1] concluded with the fairly controversial statement that decades of counterintelligence (CI) focus on what have traditionally been considered the key motives for insider espionage, summarized in the acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Compromise/Coercion, and Ego, further amended with the inclusion of disgruntlement/revenge, ingratiation, and thrills/self-importance) [2]…
By John Irvin NOIR Team In True Psychology of the Insider Spy, Part One of NOIR: A White Paper, Dr. David Charney postulates that the core psychology of the insider spy is an intolerable sense of personal failure, as privately defined by that person. It is this subjective experience that allows the would-be insider spy…
By John Irvin, NOIR Team When the Roman poet Juvenal wrote the line “Who will guard the guards themselves?” he was referring to marital fidelity. In common parlance it refers to the issue of ensuring the accountability of those already in power. However, the phrase also applies to problems facing the US government’s Insider Threat…