The operating systems that most people use every day (e.g., Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) are not designed with security in mind. Yet, in today's highly connected world, security is more important than ever before. In this talk, I will describe how the computing community has reached this paradoxical state and how my research in secure host-based monitoring provides the foundation needed to start addressing it. The talk will start with a discussion of the Turret architecture, a secure and general architecture for monitoring running systems. Then I will describe a new security application that utilize Turret to enable security policies based on user intent. With the Turret architecture as a foundation, future research can focus on how to best utilize and deploy these techniques to enable the security that users need without limiting their work environment.