Data Security Strategy

Defense will always be harder than offense. Protection harder than attack. In this asymmetrical battle, Justin discusses the essential elements of data security and how to find the signals that matter and the role of well designed systems for defense. Thankfully, many of these problems are not entirely new but some have roots from across the centuries so we will review the essence of various threat types through anecdotes and experiences to highlight what is possible. With each potential vulnerability what type of options do we have? What have others done? What should we do?

Justin is a signal finder. He started out as a builder. He grew up in home where his dad was a ham radio guy and they built things from home construction, to solder, to embedded controllers, to early PC building, to programing, even some early robotics. They just built things. This building led Justin to MIT where his building evolved to solving complex things simply, occasionally even elegantly. He then spent the 90’s designing and building fast distributed systems and the companies that housed them. Then the world changed on September 11. Justin was asked to be the CTO for the FBI (and later for all of the DOJ) and his path shifted to applied analytics. What mattered was finding signals that could both explain what had or was happening and to predict what might happen. He began to believe that encoded in the large, diverse, and dynamic data sources of our world were traces of reality or signals that could be decoded or revealed through computing, quantitative methods, and directed efforts. These signals could tell us how to act. In many ways it felt as though they allowed him to speed through and learn from the past, slow down the present, and simultaneously consider many futures. He could see things others could not. This rush and thread of meaningful impact has defined his career since then. Justin holds a SB and MEng from MIT in electrical engineering and computer Science as well as an MBA also from MIT. Over the course of his career he has started companies, led HP’s Advanced Solution Lab, directed Netezza’s NZLABS, led transformation at Bridgewater (a hedge fund), and co-Chaired the architecture committee for the terrorism information sharing environment for the President of the United States (EO13356). He is currently at Ab Initio continuing his pursuit of signals by attacking hard problems that require computational power.