GovCon Industry Wants Government to Advance Insider Threat Data Sharing; ManTech’s Kevin Phillips Quoted

The GovCon industry is calling on the government to pursue sharing of insider threat data about cleared employees with contractors as agencies prepare to ramp up their vetting and continuous evaluation initiatives as part of the administration’s security clearance modernization efforts, Federal News Network reported Friday.

Kevin Phillips, CEO of ManTech International and a three-time Wash100 award winner, said failure to share with contractors that kind of data presents risks to cleared industry partners and agencies.

“We also have people on site who have access to data and they have access to enduring secrets, yet we don’t get information from people on site if their behaviors are bad, because they can’t be shared,” he said Thursday during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance panel discussion in Virginia.

Phillips said industry stakeholders are more interested in using insider threat information to prevent potential harm to their employees, data and facilities.

“To date, it’s more about tracking and recording,” Phillips said. “Let’s identify somebody, show that they’re starting to make it on the wrong tracks. But we’re not sure [today] if we can tell if the person owns the track or the person owns the train, and we don’t know who can tell the person to stop the train. … We can’t do that [today]. We have to get to the next mile. We have to get to where we stop something by making a risk-based decision.”