Defending the Information Web - Black Hat 2001

Security to be meaningful requires big picture thinking. It also requires a multi-disciplinary approach which illuminates the landscape in novel ways. It requires looking at macro structures as well as drilling down into granular details. It requires a willingness to know that what we don’t know is so much bigger than we are. It requires a willingness to see things that can not be seen, invisible structures created out of information and energy which we then all treat as real.

Security requires understanding that the target and weapon in the modern battlespace is the mind of society itself. That may have always been true, but now in the age of CNN wars it is more obviously true in obviously explicit ways. Security requires understanding that psychology, sociology, anthropology are not add-ons but intrinsic to our understanding.

This is why our intelligence agents recruiting people for information assurance and defense, information warfare, want people with those backgrounds too, not just technical.

And above all security requires that we look at network dynamics, human network dynamics, how networks are created and sustained and generate IN US new ways of thinking and acting.