A few weeks ago, someone approached me with a request. The target of that request was a highly exposed and high-ranked political figure of a foreign country.
I won't get into the request itself, because this is not what's interesting for the point I am about to develop. What's interesting is what the person making the request did.
Within minutes, he had revealed:
- the name of the target,
- the allegations,
- the end-user of the service,
- and enough information for a malicious actor to understand exactly what was being attempted.
This was someone who presented himself as experienced. Yet he had revealed more valuable information than the service he was trying to procure.
The strangest part? He didn't seem to realize it.
Most people think risk comes from bad actors: the liar, the traitor, the spy, the fraudster.
In reality, some of the most dangerous people I have encountered were often intelligent, well-intentioned and respected.
Their problem is their lack of structure.
Over the years, I started noticing three recurring psychological profiles.
- The person who cannot keep information contained.
- The person who constantly borrows identities, ideas and ways of thinking from others.
- The person obsessed with status, credentials and external validation.
They may appear different, but they aren't. All three suffer from the same underlying condition: a lack of internal center of gravity. A stable source of identity, judgment and legitimacy.
As a result, they become dependent on external sources of meaning (the network, the group, the title, the institution).
In this brief, I want to explore each of these profiles in detail:
- How they operate and how to recognize them.
- Why they are mistaken for trustworthy, competent or even impressive individuals.
- Why they create disproportionate amounts of risk around them.
- And most importantly, why all three profiles reveal the same thing: a person who never fully learned how to stand on their own psychological feet.
The porous person
In intelligence, one of the most fundamental concepts is the "need-to-know" (The Grey Zone Protocol, Intelligence and Its Mindset, Module 3). From it, emerges an entire architecture of compartmentalization.
Fundamentally, compartmentalization exists because information has value. And because information changes behaviour.
Some people understand this instinctively. Others don't.