How to Minimize Leaking

I am hopeful that President Trump will not block release of the remaining classified documents addressing the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I grew up a Roman Catholic in Massachusetts, so President Kennedy always fascinated me.

The 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK fueled several years of hobbyist research into the assassination. (It's unfortunate the movie was so loaded with fictional content!) On the 30th anniversary of JFK's death in 1993, I led a moment of silence from the balcony of the Air Force Academy chow hall during noon meal. While stationed at Goodfellow AFB in Texas, Mrs B and I visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas and the Sixth Floor Museum.

Many years later, thanks to a 1992 law partially inspired by the Stone movie, the government has a chance to release the last classified assassination records. As a historian and former member of the intelligence community, I hope all of the documents become public. This would be a small but significant step towards minimizing the culture of information leaking in Washington, DC. If prospective leakers were part of a system that was known for releasing classified information prudently, regularly, and efficiently, it would decrease the leakers' motivation to evade the formal declassification process.

Many smart people have recommended improvements to the classification system. Check out this 2012 report for details.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more