We Have Been Inside the Building

I spent years inside the classification problem before I tried to solve it. At NGA and in NSA mission support, I watched cleared analysts burn one to three hours classifying a single document, and then watched the same document get overclassified anyway because nobody wanted to be the person who got it wrong. Overclassification isn't a paperwork problem. It stops information from reaching the people who need it.

The tooling didn't exist. Not because the problem was hard to see, but because building software for air-gapped classified environments is genuinely difficult and the commercial market is small enough that nobody bothered. So I built it.

The development side came out of the same observation from the other direction. Small defense companies kept telling me the same thing: they had a product idea, they got quoted eighteen months and a number they couldn't afford by a U.S. shop, and the only alternative anyone offered them was an offshore team that would eventually create a foreign ownership problem they'd have to explain to a contracting officer. That's a false choice, and it's fixable.