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…
March 13, 2024
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…
February 23, 2024
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…
January 26, 2024
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,…
January 10, 2024
Gen Z, or those born between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, will likely comprise at least one-quarter of the global workforce by 2025. In order to tap into that younger generation of talent,…
November 30, 2023
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…
October 5, 2023
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…
September 6, 2023
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…
August 23, 2023
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…
July 21, 2023
The intelligence community has a new data strategy. The 2023-2025 IC Data Strategy lays out the steps all 18 intelligence agencies will take to develop a more data-savvy workforce, and set the groundwork for the…
July 18, 2023
For this episode, I spoke with Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, about NPEC’s report, “Over-classification: How Bad Is It, What’s the Fix?” The over-classification of national security information has been…
June 1, 2023
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…
April 25, 2023
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…
April 24, 2023
