Assessing Security Risk in a New Normal: Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Personal and Work Behaviors

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yeung, Douglas

Contributor:

Ahluwalia, Sangeeta C.

Beaghley, Sina

Zelazny, Sarah

Language:

English

Other Title:

Assessing Security Risk in a New Normal

Place of Publication:

RAND Corporation 2023

Summary:

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a significant impact on a wide variety of risk behaviors and indicators that are considered during security, suitability, and credentialing investigations and adjudications. Given that the U.S. government personnel vetting process is focused on detecting risk and assessing an individual for their trustworthiness, such changes in behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to affect decisionmaking and adjudication regarding what constitutes risky behavior for the purposes of personnel vetting. This is particularly important when considering the risk an individual might present if granted a security clearance and access to classified information. In this report, the authors abstracted adjudicative factors likely to have been affected by the pandemic or pandemic-specific circumstances from pertinent personnel vetting documents and organized them into categories, including financial hardship and unemployment, alcohol abuse or misuse, drug and substance abuse or misuse, mental and emotional health and well-being, and changes or increases in remote or virtual work. They then conducted an academic literature and open-source data search to explore how these risk factors might have been affected by the pandemic and interviewed subject-matter and field experts to further understand how changes in these risk behaviors might affect the adjudication process. Potential action areas where the vetting processes could be adapted include monitoring risk behavior changes as social conditions change, assessing fairness to applicants, developing or formalizing mitigation actions, and addressing vetting workforce challenges during a pandemic or similar event.