SECDEF Memo Overview

Summary

Excerpt From SECDEF Memo – Impacts on SCIF/SAPF Security Webinar/
The video below elaborates on the SECDEF Memo /
Speaker Jeremy Fremin talks about the ramifications of a memo that was sent in response to a US Air National Guardsman disclosing sensitive information in the clip below. Protecting permitted access to sensitive information, especially in SCIFs, presents many issues. The memo aims to improve accountability and security protocols in the DOD mission domain. It addressed the need to deter wrongdoing while highlighting the need to have faith in the majority of DOD employees.

Video Transcript

So, for those who haven't heard about the memo, back in early twenty three, a US Air National Guardsman was arrested and charged with sharing classified information. This is all information that he was authorized to access, obviously at work in a SCIF, but not supposed to be sharing it clearly, not on a Discord channel.

But that raises some interesting challenges in the environment around, you we have access to and authorized access to how do we protect and control that. Across the board, physical security aspect, T security aspects, policy aspects around the DoD mission space and looking for recommendations and action items on what to do to help mitigate and reduce some of these threats and risks that we have in SAP Fs and SCIFs.

Ultimately, the goal of this really was to improve the safeguarding of national security information, right? And as well as to enhance the accountability measures around that. But what was interesting is they were very intent about calling out the trustworthiness of quote unquote, the overwhelming majority of the DoD personnel.

And that's true. We've all been in this environment for some of us decades, right? And we've interacted with hundreds if not thousands of people, there are tens of thousands of people in the community, and it's a very small group that actually misbehave and create these problems for us.

That kind of raises a question for me and us as we started discussing this is, you know, how do we challenge the trust of the trusted at the speed of mission, right? That's really the problem here is how do we ensure that the people that we typically trust, this overwhelmingly majority, how do we challenge that trust and ensure we still trust each of those transactions and do that at a speed of mission so that we can prevent the bad things from happening while still ensuring that the mission gets done?