The classified world is not what it used to be - and that should terrify us.
In The Secret's Out, Tabetha Baume - a Facility Security Officer with more than 25 years inside America's cleared community and host of the Cleared for Discussion podcast - delivers an urgent, fact-based account of how artificial intelligence has fundamentally invalidated the foundations of the U.S. classification system.
Drawing on the August 2025 Salt Typhoon advisory, the FBI and CISA's joint guidance on AI data security, and her own quarter-century inside SCIFs and FSO programs, Baume documents a cascade of failures: AI tools that exfiltrate information through channels no regulation acknowledges. Adversaries who collect at machine speed. The mosaic problem at industrial scale. A "Long Store" of harvested encrypted communications waiting for quantum decryption. Supply chains so porous that classification of the secret no longer protects the secret.
But this is not a book of despair. It is a book of triage. Baume argues that prioritization - ruthless focus on protecting what truly matters - is the only strategy that can succeed in an environment where comprehensive protection has failed. Drawing on her on-the-ground experience helping cleared contractors navigate NISPOM, CMMC, and the new realities of AI-enabled threats, she lays out what works, what does not, and what we must build next.
The Secret's Out is essential reading for FSOs, ISSMs, defense contractors, national security policymakers, cybersecurity professionals, and any citizen concerned with how democracies maintain advantage in the AI age.
About the Author: Tabetha Baume is a Entrepreneur, Security Director and Facility Security Officer with more than 25 years in the cleared community, founder of Green Cyber Security Services, and host of the Cleared for Discussion podcast. She lives on the Waianae Coast of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.
