Operations security (OPSEC) is a topic everyone should apply to their daily tasks every day at work and at home. Being OPSEC aware helps prevent adversaries from gaining information that can adversely affect the mission, while protecting our people, property, systems, and processes. Many programs require employees to be extra innovative in looking for ways to protect information, which is why the Y-12 OPSEC team came up with the Dragon’s Eye OPSEC Award. This recognition thanks and highlights employees who go the extra mile in applying OPSEC within their job responsibilities.
The Dragon's Eye OPSEC Award recognizes employees who put extra effort into ensuring OPSEC principles.
OPSEC Program Manager Bonnie H. said, “OPSEC gets to collaborate with many different teams across the site who are working on projects and programs involving Y-12’s critical information. It is particularly impressive when someone thinks outside the box when prioritizing the protection of Y-12 information within their jobs.”
Bonnie and her colleague, Taryn B., recently presented the first award to Brandon C., a Production Support manager.
“Brandon went above and beyond, continuing to brainstorm a solution that would protect inventory numbers from adversarial exploitation, while prioritizing the safety of his team,” Taryn explained. “After a coworker was injured through the current process of cutting out engraved inventory numbers from a metal storage container, Brandon explored a safer option that did not involve cutting the metal, but he was concerned about the security risks of not removing the inventory numbers that correspond to the contents.”
Brandon reached out to the OPSEC team to demonstrate the current process and to evaluate the safety risks of the current process against the risks of loss of information from not removing the inventory numbers from the containers.
Bonnie said, “We determined it was a ‘low risk’ of adversarial exploitation if the team did not remove the inventory numbers and agreed safety was of greater importance. The decision was made to stop cutting the inventory numbers from the metal container to avoid potential injuries. Most would have called it a day, been done with the issue, and considered the problem solved, but Brandon continued working the issue.”
Taryn added, “About 2 months later, Brandon reached out to us and wanted to share an idea that he developed to also protect the information — the inventory numbers. Brandon demonstrated, for lack of a better description, a money-clip-like metal clip that has the inventory number engraved on it. Once the contents are separated from the metal containers, the clips can be easily removed, which takes away any correlation that can be made between the inventoried contents and the containers in which they were stored.”
Brandon explained why he continued working on a solution “We rely heavily on our OPSEC team to understand how the individual pieces of information come together to give the adversary a complete picture of our processes. As we worked through ways to satisfy the criteria to close the safety issue, it became apparent that while there may not have been a hard rule that would prevent this information from going out, the information being released in its current form was merely tolerable, and not where we wanted to be as a site.” He knew that “good enough” wasn’t an appropriate answer.
“In my role, I am looking for continuous improvement in all areas. While I may not understand the intimate details that go into making an OPSEC decision, I do understand that if it is important to the OPSEC team, it should be important to me. If I can alleviate just one of the concerns, I’m helping the Y-12 mission,” Brandon explained.
This new change of process also brought benefits to Operations from a process and safety standpoint.
Brandon said, “The use of the new clips are part of mitigating the original issue, but they will also help reduce other safety concerns within the same process. With our improved process, the numbers are laser-etched onto the clips. They can be read throughout the process and recycled afterward in a separate stream. We are currently looking into adopting something similar for another process as an effort to not settle for ‘good enough.’”
This new award comes with a certificate and OPSEC swag (challenge coin, bag, etc.) provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration and will be given quarterly to recognize employees who go beyond the call when considering OPSEC objectives.
“Brandon is just one example of an employee who goes above and beyond to ensure our information is protected from adversarial exploitation,” Bonnie said. “We look forward to sharing how other employees keep OPSEC at the forefront of their daily tasks and prioritize the protection of Y-12 information.”