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The United States currently employs a periodic and aperiodic investigative and adjudicative security clearance process with origins in the Second World War. Information systems and data — e.g., financial, legal, travel — on individuals have improved dramatically since the creation of this process. This exploratory project examines various continuous evaluation (CE) 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. The authors considered CE cost estimates, examined efficacy and best practices, and assessed some of the practicalities of employing CE. This report defines CE as a vetting and adjudication process to review on an ongoing basis the background of an individual who has been determined eligible for access to classified information or to hold a sensitive position at any time during the period of eligibility. There are potential benefits from CE in effectiveness and cost over the current method of granting security clearances to personnel based on periodic reinvestigation and readjudication. While exact costs and savings depend on CE packages selected and population size, estimates revealed that savings might be realized after six years and could be substantial (in the billions of dollars) over a longer period. While the process of CE would be new, the substance is not, and, thus, if executed properly, CE would be no more invasive than current processes.

Internal security --- Intelligence service

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Over the past decade, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has evolved its programming organization multiple times, along with the process it uses for managing its resource investments. Each of these iterations was done to address challenges and inefficiencies. NGA is now considering additional steps to improve its process and is seeking to improve its practices through internal improvements, such as gaining an understanding of how previous changes affected the overall effectiveness of its resource management process, and what can be learned from other organizations. NGA is now entering a fourth period of acquisition restructuring that is intended to improve on how the planning and programming phases are managed. NGA asked the RAND Corporation to review the programming phase of the Intelligence Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation (IPPBE) process. The authors looked at three organizational eras (pre-2013, 2013-2018, and 2018 to the present) to determine the conditions, causes, and effects of performance and effectiveness generally and of previous changes to this phase of NGA IPPBE for each era. NGA is not alone in its ongoing effort to modernize its IPPBE structure to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Although NGA has conducted several previous internal studies to identify areas for IPPBE process improvement, this research is the first to synthesize findings between external literature and findings gleaned from structured subject-matter expert interviews to highlight crucial program-process issues for NGA leadership to absorb and address in any future IPPBE restructuring phase.

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U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Directorate of Intelligence sought RAND Corporation assistance in developing a repeatable process to measure the effectiveness of its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations to evaluate current performance and plan for, influence, and resource future operations. The authors of this report used a mixed set of methodologies for the analysis. They linked the effect CENTCOM wishes to achieve with its customer base to the five major roles assigned to ISR assets at CENTCOM. For each role, the authors identified CENTCOM-unique measures of effectiveness (MoEs) and measures of performance (MoPs) to evaluate the value and success of ISR support and requirements. They assessed the sufficiency of available data sources and identified new data required to complete the metrics, finding that MoPs must focus on outputs (quantitative) and MoEs on outcomes (qualitative) and that both sets of metrics must be defined in the context of their uses. Consideration of currently available data and databases uncovered issues with data heritage, curation, and volume that must be addressed to ensure that analytic outcomes using the data are reliable. Researchers provided an associated visualization tool to display the assessment results, which they determined to be the best way to allow analysts and other stakeholders to use the data to support decisionmaking.