Inside the IC

Inside the IC explores how U.S. intelligence agencies are adapting to 21st century challenges. The show features interviews with intelligence community leaders and experts about their most pressing issues involving technology, workforce, and management.


  • 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
  • The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s “Tearline” project is a unique “open source” endeavor in the intelligence community. And its efforts aren’t going unnoticed: Tearline recently won the inaugural “OSINT Unit of the Year” award from the…
    March 22, 2023
  • Compensation for individuals with security clearances increased by 7% in 2022. More than half of all cleared workers now make six figures, according to ClearanceJobs’ annual Security Clearance Compensation Report. I spoke with ClearanceJobs President…
    March 15, 2023
  • The National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center opened nearly two years ago to help the defense industrial base and other critical organizations better secure their networks. The organization works with a couple hundred of companies…
    January 25, 2023
  • The Defense Intelligence Agency is in charge of maintaining the federal government’s top-secret network. That global system is on the cusp of a major overhaul. I spoke with DIA Chief Information Officer Doug Cossa about…
    January 11, 2023
  • A declassified National Intelligence Council Assessment from April 2020 says “China and other authoritarian governments are using cyber espionage, attacks and influence operations to extend the coercive reach of their ideological enforcement and political control…
    November 30, 2022
  • The intelligence community has made strides in recent years across a range of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility metrics. But the IC’s latest demographic report shows that intel agencies still lag behind the broader federal…
    November 16, 2022
  • Congress is out-of-town for the mid-term elections, but when they come back, the annual intelligence authorization bill could get passed. There are a number of key provisions in this year’s bill, including one that would…
    November 2, 2022
  • The theme of this September’s National Insider Threat Awareness Month is is “critical thinking in digital spaces” I spoke with Rebecca Morgan, deputy director of the National Insider Threat Task Force, about how new forms…
    September 21, 2022
  • The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is among the many federal offices looking to shore up the security of U.S. supply chains. Jeanette McMillian is the NSCS’s assistant director of supply chain and cyber. “Everything…
    September 7, 2022
  • The National Background Investigations Services program, or NBIS, has been described as the “lynchpin” to the federal personnel vetting reform efforts. The massive software project is aimed at both replacing legacy IT systems with modern…
    August 24, 2022
  • The zero trust security concept has been around for more than a decade, but it’s turned into a major buzzword in recent years. The federal government now has a zero trust strategy. The National Security…
    August 11, 2022