Sina Beaghley

RAND conducted two cybersecurity-focused discovery games in Washington, D.C., and California s Silicon Valley that aimed to capture the widest possible range of perspectives. The goals were to explore opportunities for improving cybersecurity, assess the implications of possible solutions, and develop an initial framework to support debate and inform decisions regarding cybersecurity policies and practices."

Policy and U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) professionals have suggested that the IC is held in increasingly lower regard by some decisionmakers and that predictions have had variable success in influencing decisionmakers. Researchers explored whether and to what degree trust in intelligence predictions and national estimates has degraded over time and what factors might have driven any changes in the relationship between policymakers and the IC.

National security workforce applicants must provide detailed personal information for the background investigation to adjudicate their security clearance eligibility. The authors aim to identify elements that could contribute to bias and sources of inequity in the personnel vetting process for sensitive federal positions. These factors could inhibit the U.S. government's goals to hire personnel with diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has flexibilities when setting compensation to support the recruitment and retention of personnel who are critical to the DoD cyber warfare mission. The authors examine labor demand and supply for seven DoD cyber work roles to help determine whether pay adjustments are necessary.

To help inform the U.S. government in its efforts to improve the vetting processes for public trust and national security positions and protect its assets and information, the authors assembled a selected bibliography of relevant literature. The bibliography is organized into 13 categories, each containing a short summary and analysis of the respective literature, and it also examines the practices of the Five Eyes community partners.

This exploratory project examines various continuous evaluation approaches to detecting insider threats that are available to the U.S. government and assesses the relevance of these approaches to the challenges posed by such insider threats. There are potential benefits in effectiveness and cost over the current method of granting security clearances to personnel based on periodic reinvestigation and readjudication.

The RAND Program Evaluation Toolkit for Countering Violent Extremism uses checklists, worksheets, and templates to help program staff design an evaluation that is appropriate for their program type, resources, and expertise and offers guidance on analyzing the resulting data to inform improvements. This report is a companion to the toolkit and provides background on its development and testing.

This report addresses and recommends potential methods for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to identify, hire, and organize data scientists. The authors examine data science activities in the private sector and university-level data science training and also explore hiring and retention options for creating a data science capability within DIA. They also examine the results of interviews with DIA employees.