Description
19th century German scientist Justus von Liebig formulated the “Law of the Minimum,” which emphasized that if one of the essential plant nutrients is deficient, plant growth will be poor even when all other essential nutrients are abundant. The same is true for the national security fields where the minimum effort of one group produces the overall result for the nation. To raise the overall level of national security, a variety of factors should be reinforced on an ongoing basis for the whole national security enterprise. Also, it is very critical to strictly assess the status quo and minimize the most vulnerable parts as they result in likely the major immediate risk. As the United States went through the cyber disasters of Edward Snowden and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, they suffered significant tangible and intangible damages. However, the crisis breeds opportunity to help fix what was clearly broken. As an example, some measures articulated in the Snowden after-action review, such as reassessing the appropriateness of the broad range of authorities who have access to secrets, are extremely important. Another is applying the two-person rule that prevents the unimpeded access and downloading of data as occurred in these events. These would be important to introduce to the South Korean Government as well to help prevent the same thing happening to them. While we are passing through the COVID pandemic, technologies such as 5G, Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR) have helped change the traditional paradigm of places and ways people work and interact with massive amounts of data. Expanding the domain of these latest technologies into national security could significantly improve our abilities to interrogate and understand massive amounts of data. By applying VR, AR, and data-mining technologies to embassy buildings, security teams will be more professionally prepared against intrusion and the leakage of confidential information. They will also likely be much more able to detect patterns in large amounts of multi-dimensional data showing relationships not possible to see in two dimensions or with normal security tools.
