The U.S., Japan and South Korea signed an agreement to share information about nuclear and missile threats from North Korea, perhaps contributing to opportunities among contractors to connect the dots.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the trilateral information sharing arrangement the Pentagon announced Tuesday — including how governments will make sense of or act on the information collected. But here are a couple of the notable details we do know:
- The three countries will establish a mechanism to enable sharing of classified information
- The information exchange may be in any form — oral, visual, electronic, magnetic, or documentary
- The countries intend to protect any classified information that is shared among them, pursuant to existing agreements between the countries
- All shared information will be provided to the Pentagon
- When classified information is received, the Pentagon will designate information with a security classification and share the information with all participants in the agreement
What we don’t know is who will design the “mechanism” for sharing information, how the information will filter in and out of Pentagon systems, who will manage and protect those systems, or how the data will be mined or analyzed to identify potential threats from North Korea.
Might some of the requirements be met via contracts with the private sector? Probably, considering a lot of data analytics, cybersecurity and system development skills required to do the job right are more abundant in the private sector.
Of course, chances are the sensitivity of the operations will mean we won’t hear about any of them.
