JWICS

networkingsecurity

The US intelligence community's network for top secret and compartmented information, the most restricted of the three tiers.

The top of the model, and where the trade-off becomes visible. Each step up in classification buys stronger separation and pays for it in usability: fewer terminals, fewer places you can work, more friction moving anything between levels, and a growing population of people who need information they cannot reach from where they are sitting. That friction is not an implementation flaw, it is the mechanism - the security comes precisely from the cost of moving between levels. Organisations that copy the model without accepting the cost end up with the friction and not the security, because a boundary people routinely work around is a boundary in name. The general form of the lesson appears throughout this site: a control that is expensive to comply with will be complied with less, and the design question is always whether the expense is buying something proportional.

Also known as: joint worldwide intelligence communications system

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