Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

In the UK, oh wow, you will encounter some weird numbering issues. I live on the corner of a street in a very complex, 400 year old area, and I am forever leaning out of the window to shout instructions to utterly bemused couriers.

As SIO you are statutorily responsible for the joint worldwide intelligence, communication system (JWICS), maintenance, security, growth, interruptibility, etc… in addition to managing all Perssec for SCI holders, and maintaining control, security and for CNWDI as well as ACCM.

I was fresh home after a deployment to Iraq and thrown right into dealing with the Yp-Do crisis in SK and the Japanese Tsunami and Fukushima fallout that we had to provide HA/DR support for.

I was 28 years old with a one year old at home.

As part of maintaining security, I would regularly get inspected as you would expect for any manner of things. There is a special security team that lives at the defense intelligence agency primarily but also they have them for NSA and other organizations, that would do white hat penetration tests on secure information facilities, like all the ones that I was responsible for (I had a half dozen physical locations to manage).

One of these tests was during a large scale exercise. Two civilians who had perfect credentials, were trying to access our primary headquarters SCIF. At the time I think I was managing a top-secret briefing preparation and so I delegated access control, and interrogation of these two people to another Lieutenant, as well as the actual special security officer who was an E6.

They had previously tried to penetrate all of the other places on base, but failed.

The process for getting access to a SCIF if you are not housed there is that that you send a visit request from your home security office to the visiting security office which will then transfer clearance details so that you can understand what access levels to give these people.

About a month before their visit, there was a new guidance released saying that all visit requests had to have a digital requst in 100% of cases whereas are previously you could just print out your details and bring them with you, The special security officer would then look them up in a system (I won’t name), and then it’s up to the security office whether they give you access or not.

My Special Security officer and my lieutenant came to me and said they have everything that they need per the requirements that we were operating under, and that they were comfortable giving them access to a terminal where they could do what they needed to do.

I said “that’s perfectly fine however LT I want you to sit behind them basically and make sure they don’t walk off or do anything more than I’m giving them access to.”

So for like 30 minutes, we had two people in our SCIF who logged onto JWICS, we’re being actively monitored and were able to send an email and then logged off and left.

The next week, my commander asked me to go to a meeting and the penetration team briefed to the whole base how they got into all these places including my SCIF and one other facility

The good thing was, we were basically written up with flying colors, and this was the hardest possible test that they were able to get through and so everybody was generally happy with us.

This was really just one of those things where it was a specific detail that we were not up-to-date with but didn’t have any major defense in depth risks.

It's just not something you had any reason to encounter, and maybe you were off sick if it was mentioned in biology/science lessons.

Now consider it this way: the first time you experienced fireflies, you were an adult, and you could bring a fully adult, science-aware, sense of wonder to that experience.

I'd count it as a win.

Though of course I do some things well I’ve been doing most things poorly all my life. That’s what learning as an adult feels like.

Good luck.