Whether it’s WikiLeaks and CIA documents or nuclear thieves, the danger from insiders in high-security organizations is escalating in our Internet age.

But many threats from within go unrecognized or misunderstood, according to Stanford professor Scott Sagan, who co-edited a new book Insider Threats with Matthew Bunn, a professor of practice at Harvard University. Their work analyzes the challenges that high-security organizations face in protecting themselves from employees who might betray them. Sagan, a core faculty member in Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, and Bunn recently participated in an online discussion of the book’s key arguments. They will hold a talk and book signing at 3:30 p.m. on May 16 in the CISAC Central Conference Room.

Sagan and Bunn wrote, “Perhaps the most striking lesson we learned in working with scholars and officials who have dealt with this problem was the sheer scale of the red flags – from explicit statements of support for Osama bin Laden to behavior leading other staff to fear for their lives – that organizations are able to ignore.”

They found that organizations tend to have biases that cause them to downplay insider threats. In particular, organizations with high-security needs face significant risks from trusted employees with access to sensitive information, facilities, and materials. 

The researchers highlight "worst practices" from these past mistakes, suggesting lessons and insights that could improve the security situations at many workplaces. Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, has a chapter in Insider Threats that provides a detailed account of the organizational dysfunction that allowed Nidal Hasan to carry out his massacre at Fort Hood.

Other chapters include the following topics and authors:

• An analysis of the similar problems that led Bruce Ivins, who probably carried out the anthrax attacks in 2001, to continue to have access to deadly pathogens (by Jessica Stern, then of Harvard and now at Boston University, and Ron Schouten, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School);
• An analysis of the rapid rise and subsequent fall of “green-on-blue” attacks in Afghanistan – that is, Afghan soldiers and police officers attacking Americans there to help them (by Austin Long of Columbia University); and 
• An assessment of how casinos and pharmaceutical plants, with a profit incentive to protect against insiders, cope with the problem (by Bunn and Kathryn Glynn, then of IBM Global Business Services and now at the National Nuclear Security Administration). 

Another chapter examines the potential terrorist use of nuclear insiders, offering new data that shows that jihadist writings and postings contain only a modest emphasis on possible nuclear plots, and essentially no mention of the possibility of using nuclear insiders. However, the authors warn this is no reason for complacency – insiders have been largely responsible for past nuclear theft incidents.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Scott Sagan, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-2715, ssagan@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

The Center for International Security and Cooperation is educating the next generation of thought leaders and policy makers in international security. Toward this, fellows produce policy-relevant research on topics they are studying. One way they connect research with the policy arena is through journal articles, op-eds and essays. Three recent publications by CISAC pre- and post-doctoral fellows on the subject of nuclear risks include:

• Sayuri Romei’s op-ed The Hidden Costs of our Nuclear World appeared March 10 in the Monkey Cage blog that's published by the Washignton Post. Her research with Japanese people who have survived radioactive exposure in World War II and Fukushima suggests that they long endure discrimination and shame, as well as a government and society relecutant to come to grips with the human effects. "For a long time after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japanese citizens had no clear and reliable information on the health effects of the bomb. That opacity continues in the secretive and contradictory way information is coming out about the Fukushima nuclear accident," she wrote.

• Jooeun Kim’s op-ed ‘Actions speak louder than words’: Rhetoric and nuclear policy realities’ was published in the Freeman Spogli Institute's Medium site on March 7. She explored why it is so important for the U.S. to be viewed by its Asian allies as a dependable nuclear and military power that can help them during a crisis. She notes that "the greater the number of nuclear states, the higher the risk of nuclear war by miscalculation or accident." She concludes that if the Trump administration provides support to allies when they are in need, the president's "rhetoric from the campaign trail can be forgotten amid the policy realities of the international order."

• Anna Péczeli’s journal article Russia, NATO and the INF Treaty was featured in the Strategic Studies Quarterly on Feb. 28. She noted that Russia’s leadership must understand that continued noncompliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty will yield no political or military gains for them – a message that must be communicated to the Kremlin by the U.S. government. She wrote, "The INF treaty, long a cornerstone of European security, is in acute danger of collapse since the United States and Russia are operating on the basis of different, indeed contrasting, logic."  

CISAC has had 399 fellows since its founding more than 30 years ago. They conduct research, write about their findings, and spur informed public discussions about policy. To learn how to apply to the CISAC fellowship program, click here.

Non-communicable diseases such as heart and respiratory disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are now responsible for some two-thirds of premature deaths around the world. And most of those are in low- and middle-income countries.

The United Nations has estimated that on top of the social and psychological burdens of chronic disease, the cumulative loss to the global economy could reach $47 trillion by 2030 if things remain status quo.

“That was a big whopper of a number and got a lot of attention, and that was good because it raised awareness,” said Rachel Nugent, vice president for global non-communicable diseases (NDCs) at the research institute RTI International.

“It’s an issue that is driven by a lot of different factors, “ she said. “And understanding how the larger social and economic factors affect NDCs, at a policy level, very little progress has been made — there’s been very little collaboration.”

Nugent was addressing the fourth annual Global Health Economics Colloquium at University of California San Francisco, with health experts, policymakers, students and researchers from Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF who gather every year to take a deep dive into the economics of a global health issue. More than 200 experts from 10 universities and public health departments attended the conference.

The daylong gathering focused on recent developments in the economics of NDCs, looking at case studies from around the world, and new guidelines for cost-effectiveness analysis and the role of economics in reducing health inequality.

“The donors are not convinced that there are cost-effective things that we can do in these countries; a lot of them are very skeptical that this is affecting the poor,” said Nugent, a member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory panel on the management of NCDs.

In India, for example, much of the population still defecates outdoors, contaminating water sources and agricultural products, which can lead to malnutrition and physical and cognitive disorders. Many donors would rather see funds go to building latrines as they can see tangible results; NDC prevention is a long-term slog.

“But I don’t think we should necessarily think of NDCs as either-or,” said Nugent.  “I think that integration of services and programming is very much at the forefront of what is the right way to go.”

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Cost-effectiveness Analyses

Nugent’s research has shown five cost-effective interventions would avert more than 5 million premature deaths from NCDs by 2030, or a reduction of 28.5 percent in projected mortality from chronic disease around the world. And the average benefit-cost ratio is 9:1, at a global cost of $8.5 billion a year.

The interventions are raising the price of tobacco products by 125 percent through taxation; providing aspirin to 75 percent of those suffering from acute myocardial infarction; reducing salt intake by 30 percent; reducing the prevalence of high blood pressure with low-cost hypertension medication; and providing preventive drug therapy to 70 percent of those at high risk of heart disease.

Gillian Sanders-Schmidler, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and former assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Health Policy’s Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, addressed the colloquium about recommendations of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine.

“There is a continued emphasis on transparency and comparability across analyses,” said Sanders-Schmidler. “And of course the big changes are that we’re now asking for a second reference case and using an ‘impact inventory’ table to clarify the scope of the findings.”

The independent panel of non-government scientists and scholars, which also included Stanford Health Policy’s Douglas K. Owens, focused on new ways to deliver health care effectively, yet with a focus on efficiency, as health care spending in the United States has reached 18 percent of GDP, much greater than the global average of 10 percent.

The first panel that convened in 1996 recommended that all cost-effectiveness analyses of health interventions include a reference case that uses standard methodological practices to improve comparability and quality. The second panel, which published its findings in September, now recommends that in addition to the societal perspective recommended by the original panel, that CEAs include a second reference case that looks at the health-care sector impact of an intervention. Additional guidance was given on what to include in the societal perspective reference case.

The panel wrote in its JAMA “special communication” that these societal reference cases should include medical costs “borne by third-party payers and paid out-of-pocket by patients, time costs of patients in seeking and receiving care, time costs of informal (unpaid) caregivers, transportation costs, effects on future productivity and consumption, and other costs and effects outside the health-care sector.”

They found most countries, including the United States, give greater weight to clinical evidence in their cost-effectiveness analyses. The panel now recommends an “impact inventory” that helps analysts and end-users of cost effectiveness analyses look at the impact of interventions beyond the formal health-care sector.

“We’re trying to ask people to be explicit,” said Owens, director of the Center of Primary Care and Outcomes Research and Center for Health Policy at Stanford.

“We want them to look at how to value outcomes in a societal perspective, not just the health-care sector, to look at all these other sectors such as productivity consumption, criminal justice, education, housing and the environment,” he said.

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Case Studies

Several case studies presented at the colloquium indicated that policy changes, government intervention and social factors are key to preventing obesity and diabetes and other NCDs.

Kristine Madsen, an associate professor of public health at UC Berkeley who focuses on childhood obesity, spoke about the nation’s first “soda tax” on sugar-sweetened beverages, which was implemented in Berkeley in March 2015.

The city has seen a 21 percent decline in the drinking of soda and other sugary drinks in low-income neighborhoods after the city levied a penny-per-ounce tax on sodas and sugary drinks. At the same time, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, neighboring San Francisco — where a similar soda-tax measure was defeated — and Oakland saw a 4 percent increase in the purchase of sweetened beverages.

“This decline of 21 percent in Berkeley represents the largest public health impact in an intervention that I have ever seen,” said Madsen.

Sergio Bautista of the Mexico National Institute of Public Health and UC Berkeley, said that Mexico’s sugary drinks tax implemented in January 2014 is expected to lead to a 10 percent reduction in sugary drinks consumption and prevent an estimated 189,300 cases of diabetes in a country famed for its sugary bottled cola.

William Dow, a professor of health policy management at UC Berkeley, shared his research on Costa Rica, where on average people live longer than Americans, despite the several times higher income and 10 times higher health expenditures in the United States.

Costa Rican men have a life expectancy of 77 and the women typically live until age 82; in Americans the numbers are 76 and 81, respectively. Obesity is low among Costa Rican men and few of their women smoke. Lung cancer mortality in the United States is four times higher among men and six times higher among women.

“It’s remarkable in so many ways,” Dow said, noting that deaths in the Central American country are due predominantly to infectious disease. “Does Costa Rica have any unique effective programs to emulate, or is there something going on upstream driving those health outcomes?”

He believes Costa Rica’s national health insurance and excellent access to primary care for nearly all its people are key. Having this guaranteed lifetime access to health care also reduces the stress and depression that can so badly harm physical health.

“And I would argue that probably diet is one of the most important things going on here,” said Dow, noting their diets are healthy.

Costa Ricans eat mostly unprocessed foods such as rice and black beans, corn tortilla, yam and squash, with little meat and plenty of fresh fruit.

“They also have the highest remaining life expectancy at age 80 of any country in the world, he said. “What we have learned in Costa Rica would be helpful in many other countries.”

Published in the journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, this column by Seigfried Hecker below is based on content in his 2016 book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers:

On February 23, 1992, less than two months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I landed on the tarmac in Sarov, a city the government had removed from maps to keep secret its status as a nuclear weapons center. I was then director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and­­ accompanied by two senior scientists from my own lab plus three colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The six of us were about to walk through the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear bomb, the technological and intellectual powerhouse behind the sophisticated arsenal that had been pointed at our country for the previous 40 years.

Shockingly, after an hour-long flight from Moscow, we stepped out of the Aeroflot turboprop into the open arms of our Russian hosts: Yuli Borisovich Khariton, the scientific leader of the Soviet nuclear program, and other senior lab staff who had waited in the chilly wind to welcome us. Just as remarkable was the fact that this wasn’t the first time we met our Russian counterparts. Two weeks earlier, directors of the Russian nuclear weapons labs, VNIIEF in Sarov and VNIITF in Snezhinsk, had for the first time in history set foot in our labs in Livermore and Los Alamos. This exchange of visits a quarter century ago marked a new turn in relations between the world’s two nuclear weapons superpowers.

The road to Sarov

Our first meeting on Russian soil would have been deemed improbable just a few months earlier. The encounter on the Sarov tarmac grew out of both persistence by determined individuals and larger historical forces. As the Soviet Union scrambled to adjust domestic and international policy in the face of mounting economic and social challenges in the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reached across the political divide to US President Ronald Reagan to take steps toward nuclear disarmament. One such step was the Joint Verification Experiment of 1988, in which the Soviet Union and the United States asked their nuclear weapons scientists to conduct parallel nuclear-explosion yield measurements at testing grounds in Nevada and Semipalatinsk, located in what is now Kazakhstan. The experiment helped overcome a stumbling block related to verification procedures needed to ratify the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT). The 1988 nuclear tests enabled the two sides to sign a new ratification protocol in Geneva in June 1990, and the TTBT entered into force in December 1990.

As history would have it, an unintended outcome of the TTBT ratification effort proved to be the most momentous. Viktor Mikhailov, head of the Soviet team that took part in the Joint Verification Experiment and later Russian minister of atomic energy, was right when he said that “the main result of the Joint Verification Experiment was not the development of procedures and extent of nuclear test monitoring of the joint development of technical verification means, but the chance for interpersonal communications with the American nuclear physicists.”

Indeed, it was working side by side at each other’s test sites that gave rise to deep-rooted affinity and built trust. Over the years, we had only caught glimpses of our Soviet nuclear scientist counterparts at a few international conferences where they disguised their institutional affiliations, saying they were part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was through months of collaboration at our test sites that the contours of their true home institutions—the nuclear weapons labs VNIIEF and VNIITF—began to emerge. As we would discover eventually, these Soviet labs were remarkably similar to our own. We realized that in addition to nuclear weapons work, they were conducting outstanding fundamental science. We became consumed with curiosity to learn more about it first-hand. The Russians were curious about our work as well.

We were all interested in cooperation, but the Russians even more so because they sensed before we did just how dramatically the Soviet Union was changing. Lev D. Ryabev, who headed the atomic ministry at the time, told me years later that Russian nuclear weapons scientists were so eager to work with their American counterparts because “we arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat—movement by any one will affect everyone. We were doomed to work together.”

It was during a 1990 trip to Moscow by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore lab scientists for technical discussions supporting the Geneva test ban talks that Mikhailov extended an impromptu invitation to visit the USSR’s secret nuclear city Sarov (then called Arzamas-16) for the first time.

The American scientists returned with specific proposals from the VNIIEF director and his senior scientists for collaboration with the US labs, along with an invitation to Lawrence Livermore Director John Nuckolls and me to visit the secret Russian cities.

Convinced by my Los Alamos colleagues that this was a great opportunity to collaborate scientifically in important areas of research, I tried a number of avenues in Washington to get approval for exploring potential cooperation. I got little traction until the second half of 1991, after the Soviet Union had begun to disintegrate. As it did so, President George H.W. Bush became concerned that brain drain from the Soviet nuclear complex could lead to the spread of knowledge about how to build these weapons of mass destruction.

Driven by that concern, US Energy Secretary James D. Watkins approved my request for the laboratory directors’ exchange visits, and two months after Gorbachev’s formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, we entered the surreal world of the Soviet Los Alamos.

A tradition worth sustaining 

Our visits to Sarov and Snezhinsk shattered our Cold War preconceptions of the Soviet nuclear program. We were particularly impressed by the depth of scientific talent. Although they lacked modern computers and electronics, their computational achievements were remarkable, and their experimental facilities were innovative and functional. We found the scientists’ dedication to their mission deeply patriotic, and their attention to nuclear weapons safety reassuring. During our briefings and tours, Russian scientists described leading-edge research in the fundamental science that underpinned their nuclear weapons program. The visits convinced me that our US nuclear labs should collaborate with their Russian counterparts, not only to help solve immediate problems like proliferation and loose nukes, but also because in doing so we would benefit scientifically.

Our Russian colleagues were prepared with proposals for cooperation in a surprisingly broad range of areas. During a daylong session in Chief Weapon Designer Boris Litvinov’s office in Snezhinsk, watched by portraits of Lenin and Igor Kurchatov, one of the fathers of the Soviet Bomb, we hammered out a protocol for cooperation that we would take back to our governments. We came up with a long list problems we wanted to work on together. It included enhancing the security and safety of nuclear weapons during reduction and dismantlement; preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons knowledge; promoting the conversion and diversification of nuclear facilities; preventing non-nuclear states and terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons; developing joint mechanisms for emergency response; enhancing the safety of nuclear arsenals; preventing unauthorized use of remaining weapons; and promoting protection and cleanup of the environment at nuclear weapons facilities.

It turned out that we scientists were far ahead of what the US government was prepared to authorize at the time. We heard that when members of the National Security Council staff, which coordinated interagency government issues with Russia, received a copy of the protocol, they declared it did not exist and threw it in the waste paper basket. However, Nuckolls and I presented the protocol to Watkins and received approval to proceed, though only in fundamental science cooperation.

By May 1992, even though the US Energy and State Departments had only agreed to general principles, the former had provided us with the necessary financial support and the latter with the required permissions for travel to Russia. Just as importantly, we had defined what we wanted to do first in the collaboration we called lab-to-lab. We planned for joint experiments in high-energy-density physics and conferences on computer modeling and simulation.

In spite of the initial US government concerns, we would eventually end up cooperating in almost all the areas outlined in the initial protocol. A spirit of collaboration prevailed for nearly a quarter century, and was essential to successfully mitigating the dangers resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, that cooperation has all but come to an end during the past few years as relations between Moscow and Washington have soured. But the benefits of future cooperation are potentially enormous, as a new report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative makes clear. The US and Russian governments, as well as the two countries’ scientists, should seize any opportunities that arise to rekindle nuclear cooperation.

When governments and scholars work together on data security, society benefits from better safeguards and protections, a U.S. intelligence expert said Wednesday.

The difficulty is keeping up with technology and societal trends, Admiral Bobby R. Inman said at the Center for International Security and Cooperation's annual Drell Lecture for 2017. His talk was titled, “The Challenges of Providing Data Security.”

Inman, whose U.S. Navy career spanned 31 years, served as the director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and held other influential positions in the U.S. intelligence community. After retiring from the Navy, Inman worked on start-ups in the private sector, in higher education, and as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He is currently the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy at the University of Texas, Austin.

'9/11 changed everything'

During his talk, Inman recounted the early days of cryptography and the dialogue between government officials like himself and scholars at universities such as Stanford and UC Berkeley. Cryptography or cryptology is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties typically known as adversaries.

Inman was a key driver behind establishing the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978. The purpose of the “FISA” court was to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Today, technology has overwhelmed many issues regarding how the government tracks the communications of foreign entities, Inman said. And events have ushered in a different orientation on what type of information and from whom is sought by U.S. intelligence. “9/11 changed everything,” he added.

After 9/11, U.S. intelligence began to focus on foreign individuals in addition to the traditional foreign state actors, Inman said. He pointed out the value of such data collection, as penetrating small groups with human agents is extraordinarily difficult and dangerous.

“The only way you’re likely to get a lead on them (terrorists or narcotic traffickers) is through their communications,” he said.

The Internet, especially social media, has exploded in usage and made data security efforts even more complex, Inman said. “A vastly different world.” As a result, serious privacy, commercial usages and intellectual property issues need to be resolved more than ever. He noted that the rule of law is important to follow when the governmnt or other entities collect and examine communications data.

Inman is particularly worried about how “basic issues of ethics and morality” have eroded in society, which results in people scheming to sell private data for profit that puts others at risk. Another issue involves how to prevent terrorist groups from preying upon mentally weak people and recruiting them over the Internet.

A key reason Inman was invited to be the Drell speaker this year was his connection to Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie, two pioneering cryptographers from CISAC who drew Inman’s attention in the mid-1970s when they wrote a groundbreaking paper in their field of study. The three later established long-running friendships that produced strong cryptography frameworks.

Inman said, “We were privileged to start the dialogue. That’s where you begin to solve problems,” as fears and misperceptions can be resolved through discussions and openness. “I think what we need is a repeat of pulling together people” from academia and government to deal with today’s security threats. “We need to assess where we are.”

His concern is who would convene such a dialogue. “We’re in a pretty bumpy time, nationally,” said Inman, who urges a neutral party to be such a convener. On broader security fronts, Inman said he is most apprehensive about a possible nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.

Legacy of Drell

The event included a tribute to Sidney Drell, who passed away last December at the age of 90. Drell co-founded CISAC, and jointly directed it from 1983 to 1989. The Drell Lecture, which is named after him, is an annual public event sponsored by CISAC. By tradition, the lecturer addresses a current and critical national or international security issue that has important scientific or technical dimensions.

In her opening remarks, Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, described Drell as a “true giant in the field of theoretical physics” who devoted his life’s work to reducing the threat of nuclear catastrophe. One trademarks of the Drell lecture was that its namesake had the opportunity to ask the first question of the speaker. “He had a unique way of asking penetrating questions" with gentle decency and fairness, she added.

CISAC’s William Perry, also on hand to discuss Drell’s legacy, said, “Sid Drell was truly a man for all seasons” who excelled in various fields of academic and policy. Perry first met Drell 55 years ago when he was beginning his own career in nuclear arms control. “Sid’s deep interest in arms control led to him teaming up with John Lewis” to launch CISAC, he noted.

“He was an extraordinary man,” Perry said, “and we shall never see his like again.”

Drell was a fan of classical music, especially the St. Lawrence String Quartet, a chamber music group whose music was piped in to the Bechtel Conference Room before the event began.

Follow CISAC at @StanfordCISAC and  www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC

MEDIA CONTACTS

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

The populist backlash against globalization is being felt acutely across Europe as well as here in the US. And yet whether you look at it from an economic, political or military perspective, transnational cooperation has become an integral part of our global landscape. Hear CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama on the future of globalization for World Affairs. 

Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL/FSI Senior Fellow, discusses the integrity of the new administration together with David Sanger, national security correspondent, and John Rizzo, former CIA chief legal officer. Listen here.