Managing the Insider Threat

CHAPTER 8

Existential Insider Threats

A society that cannot or will not focus on matters of life and death is a society whose survival as a free nation is at least questionable.

Thomas Sowell

INTRODUCTION

An existential threat poses a challenge to the survival of the institution, and a hostile insider serving as an extension or perpetrator of such a threat has the objective of carrying out an attack fatal to the institution. Such aims are by no means novel. In a handbook for terrorists created by the Brazilian, Carlos Marighella, translated into 15 languages, and disseminated globally in the 1970s, encouragement of the use of insiders for sabotage identified the objectives “to hurt, to damage, to make useless, and to destroy” that which is ...