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.)…

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 A. Irvin NOIR Team When the prison doors shut on insider spy and former Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffery Delisle, he left behind four children and a budding relationship with a woman who loved him. Delisle had a history of marital and financial problems that included declaring bankruptcy and discovering his wife’s adultery, which…

By John Irvin, NOIR Team On 17 December, 2014, President Obama ordered restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of a US embassy in Havana for the first time in more than 50 years. The announcement was met with both favorable and critical responses from a variety of interested parties. Of the many…

Dr. David Charney will be giving a lecture about his new NOIR White Paper, Prevention: The Missing Link for Managing Insider Threat in the Intelligence Community, at the Institute of World Politics graduate school in Washington, DC on Friday, February 8, 2019 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Dr. Charney’s lecture, “Insider Spies: New Ideas…

“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…

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…

By John A. Irvin (Based on comments made during The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies panel discussion “Espionage and Intelligence in the 21st Century.”) World War II, and especially the subsequent Cold War, woke America up to the importance of continuous, institutionalized intelligence collection.  Initially we followed the example of most other nations and focused…

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…

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 BBC interviewed Dr. David Charney about the psychology of spying for this article on Kevin Mallory, a former CIA officer who was arrested for spying for China. This in-depth article gives good details about his life and the spiral that led him to espionage. Kevin Mallory: The churchgoing patriot who spied for China (BBC)…

By John Irvin, NOIR Staff One of the most desirable ancillary benefits of the proposals put forth by Dr. David Charney, MD, in NOIR: A White Paper (accessible in its entirety on this website), is the potential for at least partially solving the problem of the so-called “non-prosecutable spy.” This is the individual who is…

Dr. David Charney, creator of the NOIR concept and author of  NOIR: True Psychology of the Insider Spy and Proposing a New Policy for Improving National Security by Fixing the Problem of Insider Spies, was recently interviewed by the magazine, “Psychology Today” about NOIR. – (Psychology Today, November 2014) . . . . Of course,…

(Newsweek/Jeff Stein) . . . Based on a best-selling memoir by Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a founder of Hamas, The Green Prince is an engrossing documentary on how Israel’s counterintelligence agency, Shin Bet, managed to turn him into a spy against his fellow Palestinians—and his own father. It opens with a re-enactment of…

By John Irvin The popular axiom “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – attributed to none other than Benjamin Franklin – attests to the fact that taking action beforehand to prevent a problem from arising is considerably more cost-effective than being forced to dedicate greater resources toward fixing the problem in…

By John Irvin It seems a part of US culture to believe there are technological solutions to virtually all of our problems. That belief has a long history dating back at least to the Nineteenth Century; and who could argue that our individual lives haven’t been extended and our quality of life improved by technology?…

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 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…

By John Irvin Those who have served in the military, especially those who served at a time when World War II-era buildings were still widely in use, are probably familiar with the concept of “painting rocks.” This was originally born out of the common practice to line either side of the walkway leading to a…

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     …

The FBI has recently released two videos about the Glenn Shriver espionage case to alert other college students who are studying abroad to the possibility of being targeted for recruitment by a foreign intelligence service or entity. What are people who are recruited to spy (clandestinely directed by foreign handlers) against the US in for?…

Background on Delisle spy case — By John Irvin  NOIR Team If it was former Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffery Delisle’s intention to free himself of the burden of his financial troubles and to take some decisive action to counter his sense of helplessness when faced with the collapse of his marriage, any relief he may have…

Building a Better Mole Trap By Jeff Stein, Newsweek 6 September 2014 The continuing leaks of National Security Agency material by Edward Snowden so dominate the news that you don’t hear much these days about Cold War–style moles burrowing through the CIA, FBI and Defense Department on behalf of foreign spy services. Yet they keep surfacing,…

Brian Kelley Memorial Lecture David Charney, MD attended the recent Second Annual Brian Kelley Memorial Lecture at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC on February 7, 2014. The speaker was William Nolte who talked about the future of counterintelligence following the disclosures by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. He focused on…

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 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…

By John Irvin, NOIR Team What does a controversial psychology experiment that took place over forty years ago regarding the causes of conflict between prisoners and prison guards have in common with Dr. David Charney’s proposal for the creation of a controversial new US government counterintelligence organization to reduce the threat of insider espionage?[1]  It…

Article by Bernie Reeves in American Thinker, September 8, 2014: In the espionage business, uncovering secrets passed on to the enemy by a captured insider spy is critical to resuming normal operations. Until a thorough damage assessment is completed, intelligence agencies don’t know what data are secure, or if agents in place are safe. And while…

Dr. David Charney’s new white paper, NOIR: A White Paper – Proposing a New Policy for Improving National Security by Fixing the Problem of Insider Spies, is available not only in PDF form on our website, but you can also buy a nicely formatted printed book on Amazon or read it on your Kindle or on…

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]…