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My speech on "Playing Through the Pain: The Impact of Dark Knowledge
and Secrets on intelligence and Security Professionals" continues to
gain momentum (over 6000 views on you tube of the def con talk and
more on the O'Reilly site). The Def Con video is at <font
face="Arial"><font face="Arial"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IowHTVxHpAs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IowHTVxHpAs</a>.
The talk will given again in Columbus Ohio (4/21/17) for a
regional ISSA meeting and in Dublin for SOURCE Dublin.<br>
<br>
</font></font>Discussing a short book on the subject, the
publisher raised this question:<br>
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"the section on remedies and solutions is focused on how an
individual can divert the negative impact of keeping secrets
or moral dilemmas. I'd like to expand that to include how
organizations can help divert the negative impact on their
teams." <br>
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One issue with addressing that is, businesses are themselves
sometimes perpetrators of the conditions that create traumatic
impact and solutions are generally on behalf of keeping people
functional in light of business goals. not the well-being of the
individual. That's why my emphasis is on what the individual can do.
The example below is from the IC but applies equally to some
corporate cultures and their dynamics. (I was sent a detailed
document from the person who set up the EAP in the DIA and ran it
for years and strong opposition to her goals came from her bosses
who wanted, for example, disclosure of confidential conversations
with therapists. Her battles to sustain the program were successful
for years but when she left, they gutted the program.)<br>
<br>
Policies are policies, but the real question is not, what does a
company say they do, but what does a company DO? This morning there
is a news item that two former Microsoft employees are suing
Microsoft for not providing adequate care for their PTSD after
reviewing instances of abuse, child porn, etc on behalf of the
company's policies. Microsoft denies it, says they do everything.
So sometimes there is at least a perceived difference between what
programs provide and what feel they people need.<br>
<br>
Can you share anything at all, on or off the record, about your
insight and experience in this area? What is the actual experience
of employees who tried to avail themselves of help and - can people
keep their jobs without (1) losing face in front of peers and (2)
harming their careers? (both points raised in the talk)<br>
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Here's an illustrative example from a veteran in the IC:<br>
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<snip><br>
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"Early in my career I was assigned to a small group working on
trying to develop a means to access information about what the
Soviets were doing on a serious threat to the U.S. The way the
group was focusing on had little prospect of succeeding but was kept
being encouraged by management to keep working on it. As I thought
about the problem I realized one could capitalize on some aspects of
physics that appeared to offer great promise. I presented my
thinking and suddenly found myself called in by management to be
grilled on who had told me about what I was proposing. I said,
“Nobody told me anything. I am a physicist and my physics knowledge
led me to this.” I was then told that I now had to be briefed into
a highly compartmented very sensitive operation that I had stumbled
upon. The thought this raised in my mind was that my management
knew this solution was being pursued but still had our group working
on a not needed initiative that had little prospect of success
anyways. Was our group being used as a cover in some way? Could I
be being used on a futile pursuit without being informed of such?
Such an experience leads to a distrust of the organization that
never goes away. It can start a path to paranoid thinking that is
readily reinforced throughout one’s career.
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Much later I was informed by another
manager that he was battling to have me briefed and included on
another highly sensitive initiative. He was concerned that the mix
of people involved in it could be lead astray. He informed me
that their management was balking at including me, which just
drove my boss to be more concerned. I was briefed into it and
found it was an experiment being run by a contracted organization
to try to verify a hypothesis. It was fundamentally a scientific
experiment. The others in the group were engineers, not
scientifically trained, experienced, or oriented. As I examined
the protocols of the experiment, I found holes where one could
manipulate and control the results to be what one would like them
to be. I raised these to our group and said we needed to revise
the protocol. If the hypothesis were demonstrated to be valid,
the government would spend millions of dollars pursuing it, and
the contracted organization stood to make considerable profit. We
needed to be as sure as we could be that the experimental results
were valid. I met with huge resistance. The contractors severely
balked. The next week I was called in and formally debriefed from
the effort. The debriefing included that I could never say
anything about the project, not even acknowledge its
existence,without being subject to serious punishment. This
illustrates the tools that exist within the intelligence domain to
control one, and the dilemmas one can be thrust into and have to
live with."<br>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><snip><br>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Richard Thieme<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.thiemeworks.com">www.thiemeworks.com</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:rthieme@thiemeworks.com">rthieme@thiemeworks.com</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:neuralcowboy@gmail.com">neuralcowboy@gmail.com</a><br>
414 704 4598 (cell)<br>
neuralcowboy on twitter and skype<br>
Richard Thieme on FB and linked.in<br>
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