CATEGORY 4 Winner—The Glass Man: A Parable by Celia Hanley
This is a work of useful fiction. While grounded in real-world concepts and unclassified, publicly available information, the characters, events, and scenarios depicted are fictionalized for narrative and analytical effect.
Portions of this manuscript were developed, refined, or edited using Anthropic’s generative AI tool, Claude. The tools were used for research synthesis, structural suggestions, and language refinement. All ideas, interpretations, and final text were reviewed, edited, modified and approved by the author.
The views expressed in this work are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of the U.S. Government, Department of War, United States Special Operations Command, or the Joint Special Operations University.
This work was cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.
“There was a man who lived in a house made of glass. He believed he was hidden because he could not see through the walls from the inside. He had forgotten that glass works both ways.”
The central challenge of intelligence work in the fourth age of special operations is not classification. It is not encryption, and it is not any technical control that a government can write into a regulation. It is the fact that the commercial world has become an intelligence system—one that never sleeps, never forgets, and sells its output to anyone willing to pay.
Thomas, the protagonist of the parable that follows, is a composite of the thousands of intelligence and special operations professionals who commute to work on American highways, coach their children’s soccer teams on weekends, and carry smartphones that know more about their lives than their security clearance applications do. His story is not a warning about classified leaks or foreign recruiters. It is a story about the glass that surrounds every American who works in the national security enterprise and lives in a world of pervasive, commercially available data.
The fiction below is followed by an operational analysis. The “Beyond the Parable” section addresses what the commercial data environment means for signature management, cover development, source protection, and institutional doctrine in the fourth age. The argument is straightforward—the gap between the operating environment that exists and the doctrine that governs our people’s digital lives is a gap our adversaries are exploiting today.
The House
“The house at Herons Crossing was, by every visible measure, ordinary. The glass was in the data.”
— Field notes, declassified counterintelligence assessment, 2024
The man’s name was Thomas. He lived in a neighborhood of wide lawns and quiet streets east of Tampa, in a subdivision called Herons Crossing, where the houses were almost identical and the homeowners’ association sent cheerful emails about landscaping standards and the upcoming Fourth of July parade. He had a wife named Carla, a daughter named Emma who was nine, and a son named Ben who was six and had recently become obsessed with dinosaurs. Thomas coached Ben’s soccer team on Saturday mornings. He grilled on Friday nights. He drove a black pickup truck bought used from a dealership in Brandon.
He was, in the vocabulary of his neighborhood, unremarkable. He worked for the government—military, people understood, something to do with logistics, with planning, with the kind of coordination that requires a man to be away more than he is home. He drove west on Interstate 4 toward MacDill Air Force Base most mornings before the sun was fully up. When he was home, he was fully home: building dinosaur models with Ben, driving Emma to swim meets, sitting on the back porch with Carla in the evenings when the heat finally broke.
Several of Thomas’ neighbors had similar profiles. They drove toward MacDill in the morning, traveled for work, their spouses managed the households and school schedules with practiced self-sufficiency. A contractor couple two doors down worked at the base in capacities not discussed at the Fourth of July party. A woman across the cul-de-sac had three children and a husband deployed so often that his presence at the block party felt slightly formal, like a man on good behavior in his own life.
They were all, in the shorthand of their profession, careful people. They observed the protocols they had been given. They kept their work at work. What none of them had fully reckoned with was that discretion had become a more complicated project than it used to be.
The house at Herons Crossing was a modest four-bedroom with a two-car garage, a backyard that ran down to a retention pond, and a screened lanai where Thomas kept a hammock. Thomas’s brother-in-law had given them a Ring video doorbell as a housewarming gift. He’d installed it himself, walking Carla through the app setup with the enthusiasm of someone giving a gift they expect to discuss frequently. The camera watched the front porch, the driveway, and a wide angle of the street, uploading every motion event to a cloud server.
The thermostat was a Nest. The television in the family room was a 65-inch smart TV with voice search enabled; a second in the primary bedroom, a third in the playroom. All three registered viewing patterns—and, through the ambient listening features that powered voice search, a baseline acoustic record of the rooms they occupied. An Amazon Echo sat on the kitchen counter, managing music, the shopping list, the lights, maintaining an always-on microphone in the most-occupied room of the house.
Emma’s tablet sat in a pink case on the counter. Ben’s game console was docked to the family room television. Carla’s phone, charged on the nightstand, had location sharing enabled so she and Thomas could always find each other.
It was a normal house. The devices in it were the devices of a normal American household. They were also, in aggregate, a data engine that ran without pause, generating a continuous and commercially available record of who was home, when, in what rooms, watching what, saying what to the kitchen counter, ordering what, arriving and departing at what hours.
None of this data was classified. Most of it was, in the strict legal sense, voluntarily provided. All of it was sold.
Thomas had a personal phone—a standard commercial model, with the same applications most people used. The phone was not optional. His cover required the digital habits of a person who exists authentically in the commercial world. A man without a smartphone in the 2020s is an anomaly. An anomaly is a flag.
The phone therefore carried a liability proportional to its necessity. It knew his location at all times, his communication patterns, his purchasing behavior, his physical routine. It was registered in his true name, tied to his home address, linked to his credit cards, associated with the WiFi network at Herons Crossing, and geographically correlated with the badge reader at MacDill every morning he drove in. Across months and years, the pattern—the routes, the timing, the facility proximities—told a detailed story about who Thomas was, available to any sufficiently motivated buyer in commercial location data markets.
He also had a work phone, a separate device that traveled with him on operations and stayed in a small safe in the bedroom closet when he was home. The problem was the overlap. When both phones were in the same space, they co-located in the record. The cellular network saw two devices occupying the same space. Aggregated with other data—the daily commute to MacDill, the second device appearing before international travel, both devices going silent when Thomas was away—it was the kind of pattern that adversary analytical systems were specifically designed to resolve.
Thomas knew this. He managed it with protocols that reduced the exposure without eliminating it, because the exposure could not be eliminated without eliminating the cover. This was the central tension of his professional life, lived quietly in a house full of devices that never stopped listening.
The Community
On Saturday mornings, Thomas coached the soccer team. On Sunday afternoons in the fall, half the street gathered in someone’s backyard to watch football. The block party in July lasted until the mosquitoes made it untenable. The neighborhood had a Facebook group where people posted about lost dogs, suspicious vehicles, and whether the crack in the retention pond berm was something the county should know about.
The community was close in the way that communities close around shared experience. The shared experience here was a particular combination of purpose and displacement —purpose in the work, displacement in everything the work required—and it created a bond that did not require articulation. People helped each other with school pickup when someone was traveling. They held mail and fed pets. They did not, as a rule, discuss the details of what anyone did.
They did, however, discuss their lives. They shared photographs on the neighborhood group—the soccer game, the swim meet, the Fourth of July, Ben’s birthday with the Triceratops cake. They posted their children’s school accomplishments. They tagged each other at restaurants in Ybor City, locations embedded in metadata whether or not the tags named them. The contractor couple’s daughter ran track; her times were posted to a community athletics page indexed by search engines. The retired officer across the street had a LinkedIn profile that listed, with some care, a professional history a motivated analyst could cross-reference against public records and facility addresses.
This was not carelessness. This was community.
What it meant in aggregate was that the cluster of households at Herons Crossing generated a data signature larger than the sum of its parts. The photographs placed faces at addresses. The social connections mapped relationships. The driving patterns and badge records and phone geolocation data established routines. Any one element was ambient noise. Together, through time, processed through the analytical systems that adversary services had invested in building, it was a targeting map.
The Road
On a Tuesday in March, Thomas drove to MacDill for a briefing that would determine where he was going next and who was going with him. He left the house at six in the morning, kissed Carla on the forehead, and pulled out of the driveway while the neighborhood was still dark. The truck’s navigation system logged the departure. The cellular network registered the transition of his phone from one tower to the next as he moved west on the interstate. A license plate reader at the interchange noted his plate at 6:14 a.m. and transmitted the record to a commercial database.
He stopped for coffee. He paid with his phone. The transaction recorded his device identifier, the merchant, the time, and his precise GPS coordinates, sharing it per the payment application’s terms of service with advertising intermediaries maintaining his behavioral profile.
He arrived at MacDill and badged through the gate. He did not think about the drive. He was thinking about the briefing.
There were two of them in the room: Thomas, and a woman named Maria who was his partner on this operation, a former signals intelligence sergeant who had spent enough time in denied environments to have developed the particular economy of movement that distinguishes people who have learned it from experience. The briefing lasted three hours. When it finished, they had a mission, a timeline, an area of operations, and a problem that was not on any of the slides: how to get there.
In an earlier era, the answer would have been cover documentation—two names that were not their names, two passports built to specification, two legends plausibly placing them in the region for plausible reasons. The legends would have held because the systems checking them were human, imperfect, and slow.
The systems that would check them now were not human, not imperfect, and not slow.
In the fourteen years since Thomas had first deployed to the region, over 70 countries had installed biometric collection at their borders, and many shared that data laterally, including with services whose interests were specifically opposed to his. His face had been photographed at coalition checkpoints, border crossings, and hotel lobbies across 15 years of deployment. Those photographs had been processed into numerical representations of his facial geometry and stored in databases he did not control and could not edit. The same was true of Maria.
They were going to travel in their true names.
This was not a defeat. It was an adaptation. True names, under a coherent cover story supported by a consistent commercial data history, were more defensible than invented names that a border camera could contradict before the passport officer finished reading the entry form. The biometric was permanent. The cover name was not. Two people needed a story their faces could tell.
The cover they built was straightforward: two soldiers from a sustainment brigade on standard military orders, traveling to conduct site coordination with regional partners on port throughput and equipment staging for a rotational exercise. The region had ports, had exercise programs, had American soldiers moving through on exactly this kind of errand. The cover documentation—orders cut through the unit, travel on the government travel system, .mil email addresses that resolved—supported the story at the level a customs officer would probe. The commercial data histories of both were the deeper architecture: each had, over two years, generated a trail consistent with soldiers who coordinated logistics for a living.
The Phones
Each of them had a personal phone and a work phone. The separation of the two devices was standard practice—the personal phone carrying the accumulated digital life of a private person, the work phone configured for operational use, each maintained in its own lane.
The lane was harder to hold than it appeared.
The personal phone could not stay home. A traveler who lands in an international airport without a personal phone—without the location history, the photographs, the social media presence accumulated by moving through the world with a device in a pocket—is, in the vocabulary of the systems that would see him, an abnormality that needs to be resolved. The personal phone had to travel because the cover needed it.
The work phone carried a .mil address and the identity of the soldier Thomas was presenting himself as being. Its calendar held the appointments that gave the week its official shape: a port authority meeting, a facility walk-through with the host nation liaison, a foreign ministry coordination session. These were real meetings attended by real people. Authenticity is not a posture but a practice, because the record of an authentic week and the record of a fabricated one look different to the systems built to tell them apart.
When both phones were on in the same location, they co-located in the record. The cellular network did not care which phone belonged to which identity. It saw two devices at the same address, the same airport gate, the same hotel. An analyst with access to the right commercial data streams could, over time, resolve the consistent co- location of two device identifiers into an inference about their common owner. The inference did not need to be certain to be damaging. It needed only to be flagged.
The solution they practiced was airplane mode. While conducting operational work in the city, both phones went dark to the network—present but silent. A device present but silent is different from a device that is not there, and the distinction mattered.
Customs presented a vulnerability that airplane mode could not address. In several countries in the region, officers had developed the practice of asking travelers to unlock and display both phones when two devices were detected. The moment both phones were on the table, the separation of identities collapsed. The personal phone knew Thomas’s home address, his family, his routes to MacDill. The work phone—the .mil address, the port coordination calendar—knew the cover. Both phones, side by side, knew the same person.
They talked about this in the planning meetings. Maria raised Faraday bags. Thomas pointed out that a traveler carrying a Faraday bag was a different kind of flag— protecting your technology signals you have something to hide, and a customs officer who sees that signal will not stop asking questions. They agreed: both phones on their persons, in airplane mode during operational work and transit, active when the cover required it. Battery management as explanation, normalcy as discipline. It was not a solution, but it was the best available management of an exposure that could not be closed.
The City
They flew commercial together because the cover required it. Two soldiers traveling to the same facilities on the same orders do not arrive days apart. The cover was not a pretext for the trip. The cover was the trip, performed continuously for every camera and desk clerk who might later be asked what they remembered.
The airport where Thomas made his connection had been upgraded the previous year with a facial recognition system at the transit gates, a contract awarded to a company whose engineering team was supported, at a level not described in the public procurement documents, by a technology transfer arrangement with a state-owned enterprise. The system’s stated purpose was passenger processing efficiency. Its data retention policy specified a 90-day retention window. Whether the data remained beyond 90 days, and where copies of it traveled in the interval, was not described in the public filing.
Thomas walked through the terminal the way he had been taught: head level, pace steady, a man with a carry-on and a reason to be there. The cameras watched him the way cameras watch everyone, which is to say without judgment, without curiosity, and without forgetting.
The river city received them without ceremony. Thomas checked in and reviewed the week on the work phone: a port authority meeting on day one, a facility inspection on day two, a foreign ministry coordination session on day three. Genuine appointments, genuine channels. In the gaps, other work would happen. His personal phone, restored after customs, had already logged the hotel’s WiFi and—through the travel application managing his itinerary—transmitted the hotel name, dates, and confirmation number to servers whose data practices he had not reviewed. The hotel ran on a Chinese- manufactured property management system. Where the registration data went was a function of its licensing agreements, visible to neither Thomas nor the desk staff.
Thomas walked the city in the mornings—the slow absorption of a place, the reading of its patterns. He bought tea from a cart vendor near the old market. He noted the cameras at intersections, the new ones on poles not there on his previous trip, and noted also that he could not know how many cameras he was not noticing.
Both of them worked the city. Maria moved through areas of operational significance with the patience of someone who had learned to look like she was doing something else—checking her work phone, photographing a building facade the way a logistics coordinator might photograph a loading dock. Thomas walked his routes with the same professional plausibility: a man with a schedule moving between points. Neither operated under the assumption of not being watched. The question was not whether their movements were being recorded but whether the record they were producing was consistent with the story they were telling.
On the morning of the third day, Thomas attended the foreign ministry coordination session and discussed container manifests with the competence of someone who had prepared. That afternoon, he walked the route—approaches to the target’s neighborhood, alternative approaches, exfiltration options in the order he preferred them. He walked as a man finishing a workday, without particular urgency. Smart Mobility Initiative cameras at intersections recorded him at seven points. Eleven ATM camera fields extended to the sidewalk; his face passed through eight of them. A rented motorbike carried a GPS transponder logging every street and timestamp to a fleet management platform he had not audited.
The route was professional and careful. It was also a data object that existed independently of the care that had shaped it, visible to the machine layer of the city whether or not any human eye reviewed the footage.
Everything that had happened in the city up to that point—the port authority meeting, the facility inspection, the foreign ministry session, the routes walked in the mornings— had been in service of this. Not the logistics coordination. Not the exercise planning. The meeting. The one that was not in any calendar or travel order or system that connected to anything the Army knew about.
The Meeting
The man Thomas’s team was there to meet was code named the Archivist. He was a mid-level official in a ministry whose function Thomas understood in general terms. The Archivist had decided, for reasons that were his own and that Thomas found plausible without being able to fully verify, to share certain information with the Americans. He was not an idealist. He was a man who had made a calculation.
The meeting took place in a restaurant on a side street—the kind with no sign that charges for discretion as well as food. Thomas arrived first. The Archivist arrived 11 minutes later. The conversation took 45 minutes. Thomas held it in his memory the way he had been trained, precise and complete, and left before the Archivist.
Maria was outside. The plan had always been to walk back to the hotel together—two colleagues from the same unit, done with their errands for the evening. A person who leaves a restaurant alone in the dark is a data point; two colleagues heading back to their hotel are an explanation. Her work phone showed a calendar entry for a host nation logistics vendor meeting that had concluded thirty minutes earlier. She had attended that meeting. She was a soldier finishing her day.
The Archivist carried his phone, as Thomas had told him to. Leaving it at home creates an absence, and an absence is a signature. He had been told to carry it in airplane mode—dark to the network, logging ambient sensor data internally that would never transmit. His safety required the same discipline as Thomas’s. The restaurant’s payment terminal, however, processed a card transaction from another table during the meeting; that transaction placed a device at those coordinates, and the data passed through advertising networks whose client lists Thomas would not have approved. All of it contributed to a record of who had been there that evening.
Thomas found Maria near the market, and they walked back through streets that smelled of turmeric and motorbike exhaust. They talked about the port authority visit. He thought about Carla on the back porch, and Ben’s dinosaurs, and the hammock by the retention pond.
The Photograph
They returned to Florida on the same flight, carrying the same cover story back through the same customs halls, the same biometric cameras, the same cellular networks logging the tower transitions of two devices that had spent a week behaving exactly as two soldiers on a routine coordination visit should behave. Thomas came home on a Thursday. Ben was waiting with a new dinosaur book, Emma had swim times from a meet he had missed, Carla made black beans with sofrito. He sat at the kitchen table with his family and let himself be fully there.
Three weeks later, a counterintelligence officer he had not previously met—compact, precise, economical with words—placed a folder on a table at MacDill and said, “We don’t know if anything happened in the city. We’re trying to understand some activity in the aftermath.”
She placed a photograph on the table. It had been taken from a camera angle Thomas did not recognize, on a street he recognized as two blocks from the restaurant. The photograph showed him from a three-quarter angle, in the clothes he had worn that evening, looking like himself. It had arrived through a partner service, associated with a dataset the partner service had not been able to fully characterize. Whether it had been taken by a system that was routine and benign, or by a system with different intentions and different clients, was not established.
“I ran the route,” Thomas said.
“I know you did.”
The operation was, by every formal measure, successful. The information the Archivist provided was assessed as credible. The cover held. The team returned intact. No adverse action followed.
And yet the photograph existed. His face was in a dataset somewhere, associated with coordinates close to the meeting location, time-stamped to the evening in question. The next trip would begin with his face already present in some record, in this city or the next. Whether that record would ever be consulted, and to what end, was not something Thomas could control.
This was not catastrophe. This was condition.
The Home
That evening Thomas sat on the lanai in the April dark, the retention pond flat behind the yard, a wood stork standing at the far edge with the patience of something that has been doing this for a long time. Carla came out with two glasses and sat in the chair beside the hammock. The Alexa, inside, was playing something slow from the kitchen speaker. The family room television glowed through the screen door; Ben had left it on, as he always did, a cartoon paused on a frame that had no one in it anymore.
Thomas looked at the house. He looked at the Ring camera’s small indicator light above the front door, which had been a gift from someone who loved them. He thought about where the footage went. He thought about the Nest reading the rhythms of the household. He thought about the three televisions, networked and listening. He thought about the Alexa on the kitchen counter, always on, the most capable listener in the room, and about the terms of service document that described what it did with what it heard, which he had agreed to without reading the year Carla set it up.
He was not afraid. He was a man who managed fear the way a craftsman manages his tools. But he recognized, sitting in the dark, that he had been thinking about his work and his home as two separate things, and that they were not. The tradecraft of the city —the cover work performed with genuine competence, the port authority meetings attended without fiction, the phone management, the routes walked with cameras watching every step—existed in tension with the glass of the house. Everything the house generated told a story about the man who lived there, and the man who lived there was the same man who had traveled to the river city, whatever work he had been sent to do.
The cover was the work of months. The house was the work of years. The house was the more complete record.
There is a version of this story with a more enduring ending. The photograph is not from a routine camera but from a system that has resolved Thomas’s face and queried it against a database assembled from hotel check-ins, fitness tracker data, and a running heatmap tracing a route from Herons Crossing toward a facility that joggers had no official reason to approach. The cover held at customs. The biometric did not need the customs officer. Thomas and Maria return intact, but the file in a server farm on the far side of the world has grown by two faces—two real names, two Florida families whose patterns are now part of the record.
Thomas does not know which version he is living in. That is the condition. That is the point of the glass house: not that it will certainly be used against you, but that you cannot know. The walls are always clear to someone standing outside.
The glass house is everywhere now—in the subdivision and in the city on the river, in the customs hall and in the family room where the television waits on its paused frame. The doctrine that will allow a man to work inside glass without being seen has not been written at the institutional scale the problem requires. The gap between knowing and acting is the gap in which the photograph appears.
Beyond the Parable: Operationalizing Signature Management in the Fourth Age
The Environment Thomas Lives in Is Not Fiction
The parable above depicts conditions that are present, not projected. The facial recognition infrastructure deployed across more than 100 countries, some manufactured by entities with ties to foreign state intelligence services, is an operating reality. [1] The fitness and wearable technology vulnerability became publicly undeniable when a commercial fitness application’s global heatmap traced the outlines of classified military installations in 2018. [2] The biometric persistence of records acquired at checkpoints and hotel lobbies across years of deployment is a structural feature of the current environment, not an edge case.
The Fourth Age of Special Operations Forces demands that the community treat the commercial data ecosystem as an adversarial intelligence environment—one that is permanent, pervasive, and already populated with information about every operator, intelligence professional, and support staff member who carries a phone, uses a credit card, or lives in a neighborhood that has a Facebook group.
The modern counterintelligence (CI) mindset required for this environment has three components: anticipate, adapt, and achieve. Each is discussed below in terms of what it means for the specific vulnerabilities The Glass Man parable illustrates.
Anticipate: Manage the Signature Before Deployment
Thomas’s operational tradecraft was sound. His personal and work phone discipline, his route work, his cover meetings were professional and careful. What preceded them, at home in Herons Crossing, was not managed at the same standard.
The problem of “anomalous absence”—the intelligence signature created when a person who normally generates constant commercial data suddenly goes quiet—is now a documented vulnerability. The same logic that flags a SEAL team’s departure from Fort Bragg based on metadata also flags an intelligence officer’s departure from a Tampa suburb. Pizza delivery records drop. The coffee stop near MacDill goes missing. The Ring camera sees a departure at an unusual hour.
Proactive signature management means maintaining a plausible ambient data profile during operational travel. This is not deception of the American public; it is the same discipline that governs cover work applied to the commercial data layer. Before departure, operators should establish patterns of digital life—scheduled purchases, automated activity, device pings—that allow an absence to read as presence. This requires institutional support, not individual improvisation.
At the community level, the Herons Crossing problem is harder. The data generated by a cluster of national security households is not something that individual discipline can fully manage. Aggregate geolocation data, social graphs assembled from neighborhood applications, and the cross-correlation of multiple household patterns are analytical products available to adversary services that no single family’s operational security (OPSEC) can prevent. This is an institutional problem that requires institutional response: community-level signature awareness, coordinated guidance on social media and neighborhood applications, and recognition that the targeting map is assembled from individually harmless pixels.
Adapt: Treat the Home as Part of the Operational Environment
Thomas’s house generated more intelligence about him than any single deployment. The Ring camera, the Nest thermostat, the voice-enabled televisions, the smart speaker on the kitchen counter—together they maintained a continuous record of the rhythms of a household occupied by someone who commutes to a military installation and disappears periodically for work.
Current doctrine addresses classified information handling, foreign contact reporting, and device management on official networks. It does not, at the scale and specificity the problem requires, address what national security professionals’ commercial home environments generate and where that data goes.
The adaptation required is not the elimination of smart home technology—that is neither realistic nor the point. The point is that the home must be understood as part of the operational environment, subject to the same threat modeling that governs overseas tradecraft. This means:
Device awareness: Understanding which devices in the home are always-on listeners, what data they collect, where that data goes, and who can purchase it. Alexa’s terms of service are a foreign intelligence collection policy written in the language of customer convenience.
Data broker exposure: Commercial data brokers aggregate and sell information from dozens of sources—location data from phones, purchase histories from credit cards, viewing patterns from smart televisions—into detailed behavioral profiles. The defense industrial base equivalent of this problem—protecting civilian researchers from the Chinese Communist’s Party’s Ministry of State Security talent-spotting algorithms that scrape LinkedIn and social media—has been documented. [4] The same logic applies to the homes of cleared personnel.
Biometric persistence: Thomas’s face is in databases he does not control, assembled from 15 years of legitimate travel. This is not a failure of tradecraft; it is the condition of operating in a world where biometric collection is pervasive and data retention is permanent. Cover name strategies must account for biometric persistence from the outset, not as an afterthought.
Achieve: Build the Doctrine That Matches the Environment
The gap between what Thomas knows and what the institution has equipped him to manage is the central operational problem the parable surfaces. He is not ignorant of the risks. He knows his phones co-locate in the record. He knows his home generates data. He knows the cameras in the city are watching. He manages what he can with the tools and protocols available.
What he cannot do, individually, is solve an institutional problem.
The Jedburgh teams of World War II provide a relevant precedent. Inserted into Nazi- occupied France, they operated in denied areas saturated with human and technical sensors—a surveillance state that, in its scope and integration, offers useful analogy to the current commercial data environment. [5] What made the Jedburghs effective was the systematic encoding of hard-won lessons from earlier British Special Operations Executive failures into training, doctrine, and selection. The lessons from Thomas’s operating environment need the same treatment: not informal awareness briefings, but doctrine.
Specific institutional actions follow from the three cases the parable illustrates:
For the home environment: Develop and mandate guidance on commercial smart home technology for cleared personnel at sensitive positions. Model this on existing guidance for foreign travel—not prohibition, but informed management and periodic threat briefings.
For cover and signature development: Institutionalize hire-to-retire signature management as a standard planning element for operations involving true-name travel. This includes establishing plausible ambient data profiles throughout their careers and maintaining community-level OPSEC awareness for clusters of national security households.
For source protection: The Archivist carries a phone. In the Fourth Age, source protection protocols must account for the commercial data environment the source inhabits—not only their communications security, but their location data, their device pairings, and the ambient commercial record that a meeting generates even when both parties practice good tradecraft. A restaurant payment terminal two tables away is an intelligence collection system.
The Call: Elevate Signature Management to Strategic Priority
The doctrine that allows a man to work inside glass without being seen has not been written. The individuals who need it—Thomas and Maria, the contractor couple two doors down, the source sitting in an unsigned restaurant on a side street—are managing their exposures with individual discipline and institutional guidance written for a different era.
The Fourth Age of Special Operations Forces demands more. The commercial data ecosystem is not going to become less pervasive, less commercially available, or less integrated with the analytical capabilities of adversary services. The photograph that appeared on the CI officer’s table was not a failure of tradecraft. It was the product of an operating environment that tradecraft alone cannot solve.
The glass house is everywhere. The doctrine that addresses it is not. That gap is the work.
About the Author
Celia Hanley is the President of Catalina Intelligent Solutions, where she brings four decades of senior national security leadership, with specific expertise in geopolitical risk, nation-state threats, human intelligence, counterintelligence, executive and asset protection, risk mitigation, and global operations. She served as the first Biometrics Executive for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and as the Chief of the first Department of Defense Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance Task Force at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Notes
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Facial Recognition Technology: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance (The National Academies Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.17226/27397; Government Accountability Office, “Facial Recognition Technology: Current and Planned Uses by Federal Agencies,” Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2021, https://www.gao.gov/assets/ gao-21-526.pdf, 12–14; “Facial Recognition,” INTERPOL, accessed 2025, https:// www.interpol.int/How-we-work/Forensics/Facial-Recognition.
- Alex Hern, “Fitness Tracking App Strava Gives Away Location of Secret U.S. Army Bases,” The Guardian, January 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Efforts to Mitigate the Effects of Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance,” (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2025), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ reports/25-065_t.pdf.
- Shane McNeil et al., “Perceptions of Counterintelligence in Corporate and Academic Sectors: Risks, Awareness, and Strategic Implications,” Washington, DC: Sentinel Research, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17681907, 5.
- Major Mark Thomas and Benjamin Jensen, PhD, “In Denied Areas: Lessons from the British Special Operations Executive and Jedburghs,” Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) Press, 2025, https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/263; See also Will Irwin and Isaiah Wilson III, The Fourth Age of SOF: The Use and Utility of Special Operations Forces in a New Age (JSOU Press, 2022).
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