This post is based on an interview with Mr. Neal Pollard. It is part of our series of interviews of OODA Network members. Our objective with these interviews is to provide actionable information of interest to the community, including insights that can help with your own career progression. We also really like highlighting some of the great people that make our continued research and reporting possible.  For the full series see: OODA Expert Network Bio Series.

Career Progression:  Neal Pollard loved being a student and tried several disciplines while studying at Boston University and the University of Oklahoma.  His innate curiosity made him an early adopter of computers.  He especially enjoyed technical challenges, like cryptography. Neal wanted to contribute to our National engagement with our Cold War Adversary – the Soviet Union.  Mathematics, cryptography and International Security were the perfect combination to accomplish this.  Like most of our National Defense team, Neal was astonished when the Soviet Union abruptly dissolved in 1991.  He needed a new focus.

Neal experienced transitional moments when he was in London that same year, in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, and while Desert Storm had launched.  Also during those events, the Provisional Irish Republican Army had stepped up a campaign in England.  He was in both Paddington and Victoria stations just hours before the PIRA bombed them, and actually saw the puffs of smoke while walking through Trafalgar Square when the PIRA launched mortars against 10 Downing Street.  When he returned to the University of Oklahoma, he sought out a family friend who happened also to graduate courses on terrorism at OU – this directed his attention to terrorism rather than the Cold War, which seemed to have ended.   He landed a spot at University of St Andrews in Scotland – at the time, the most advanced and prestigious place to study terrorism.  While there, he would work with some of the worlds most accomplished experts, connecting his love of computers and cryptography to this new threat – terrorism.  His graduate thesis was on the use of Military Force on Countering Terrorism, only because no one on the faculty was comfortable supervising his first choice of a thesis topic, computer terrorism.  Nevertheless, he published a much longer scholarly work on that topic while in graduate school, working with the chair of the Computer Science department at Georgetown University.

After graduation, he picked up a temporary job back home, working for the Tulsa Public Works Department as an Engineering Aide.  On the 19^th of April 1995 he was busy at work when he heard the report about a terrible accident at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  They all turned on the TV to see what was happening. Neal suspected immediately it was terrorism – not an accident, as the damage shown from news helicopters looked like building bombings perpetrated by Hizb’allah.  His suspicions were confirmed about the same time he reached the site of the bombing hours after it happened: 168 people were killed when a domestic terrorist drove a fertilizer truck bomb into the building.  This time, Neal saw up close and personal the direct impact of terrorism, as he saw toddlers pulled out of the rubble.

Neal picked up a job with SAIC and moved to DC.  He was soon working in the SAIC Strategic Assessment Center where he met some brilliant mentors.  He spoke at INFORWARCON 1995 and submitted a paper, with his colleagues Matt Devost and Brian Houghton, to the National Defense University titled: “Information Terrorism: Can you trust your toaster?”.  This was in 1996, way before these types of issues were well known.  They won the contest and were given the prestigious Sun Tzu Award. This gained him national recognition as an emerging leader in the world of Information Warfare.

Neal co-founded the Terrorism Research Center on the one year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, as a way for Terrorism Experts to collaborate and share the information they were learning.  Soon all the major players in defending against terrorism were using the resources collected at this site.  Additional interesting studies and investigations led him to develop a helpful Emergency Responder Technology Planning Process that could be duplicated across multiple agencies and organizations.  This process was just coming into its full potential when September 11^th proved just how valuable it was.  He soon transferred over to a Government job, working for the National Counterterrorism Center.  He worked in various roles with a “blue badge”.

PricewaterhouseCoopers was the perfect job for him when he left Government nearly a decade later.  He was able to bring back his prior, deep strategic understanding of cyber threats to help build up their new cybersecurity and incident response capabilities, making partner in just a few years.

Neal recently started a new adventure: he’s the Chief Information Security Officer for UBS.  He’ll be moving to Zurich soon, and looks forward to working in the financial services sector in his new role.

Surprises:  The one thing that really caught Neal off guard was how fast the Soviet Union collapsed.   All his aspirations, to spend a career dedicated to defeating this cold war adversary, appeared to become irrelevant, overnight!  Of course, with the lens of hindsight, we see that’s not exactly true.

Risks in the Near Future:  Neal is cautious about the security implications of transformational technologies like AI and automation. “When you automate something, you take a reliable tool (the trained human) out of the loop.” He says.  He’s not overly concerned about the transfer of data to the cloud, as long as we do it smartly.

Advice for Decision Makers:  Cyber security involves a lot of different people in an organization, and many of the key partners in an organization are at the top of the pyramid.   Neal cautions: “You can’t herd cats.  But you can move their bowl.  Think about the carrots and sticks needed to get people to communicate securely.”   Neal also advises: “Don’t underestimate the importance of the human.  But they can be the source of vulnerabilities.  Organizations need to maintain a cybersecurity team, but they also need a larger cybersecurity-minded worked workforce.”

Views on Thought Leaders:  There are some luminaries in cybersecurity that Neal always turns to, who always have seen “around the corner” and can explain useful insights extracted from complex technical concepts to the busiest, most distracted non-technical executive.  These thought leaders who have influenced Neal’s thinking on cyberspace include Phil Venables, Dan Geer, the recently deceased Steve Lukasik, Lawrence Lessig, and of course the classic fiction writers William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick.  Perhaps the one book that had the profound impact on Neal’s thinking about the broader social implications of cyberspace was The Twilight of Sovereignty by Walter Wriston, written in 1992.  This book, read in tandem with the global models described by Headley Bull in his 1977 international relations classic “The Anarchical Society,” describes modern globalization and the competition we see daily in cyberspace, from the technical level of cybercrime all the way up to the global distribution of effective power in international relations, and who truly wields it.   More personally, Neal uses an insight from Wriston as a daily leadership concept.  Wriston wrote that money goes where it’s wanted and stays where it’s well treated.  It’s an old adage that people and ideas are valuable assets, but Neal applies Wriston’s philosophy here: good people and ideas are truly like money – they go where they’re wanted and they stay where they’re well treated, and the job of a leader is mainly just to surround themselves with good people and good ideas, and treat them well.

Quick Hits:

• Books Neal is currently reading:
  • Biography and new translations of Miyamoto Musashi by Kenji Tokitsu
• Code: And other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig (his new edition)
• The Institute by Stephen King
• The Mission Song by John LeCarré
• Belt and Road by Bruno Maçães

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neal-pollard-78587/