The Intersection: Espionage threats, tech, and algorithms

Transcript

foreign [Music] and welcome to the latest edition of the intersection a series on the inkito podcast where we discuss topics relating to the intersection of technology and National Security I'm your host Steve bauscher and we're thrilled today to be joined by Dr Amy ziegart the Morris Arnold and Nona Gene Cox senior fellow at the Hoover institution senior fellow at the Freeman spogly Institute for international studies professor of political science by courtesy of Stanford University and a contributing lawyer to the Atlantic among her five books is the best seller spies lies and algorithms the history and future of American intelligence which was published in February of this year this book gives an overview of intelligence Basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies discusses how technology is changing the nature of intelligence and explores the issues of Traders congressional oversight and covert action I can't think of a person more suited to talk about the intersection technology National Security so we're thrilled to have Amy with us today thank you Amy thanks so much Steve for having me on great so uh uh we're going to start as usual by Framing this uh uh uh conversation by talking about the great power competition that's existing the world today between the U.S uh uh uh China and Russia to State shape worldwide security infrastructures Trade Practices investment regimes and Technology developments but in order to uh give our listeners uh some context for where you're coming from Amy maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to where you are today what led me to where I am today that the answer is an improbable and circuitous route so just a little that's great I think I think people love to to hear their stories because everyone thinks you know life is a very straight-line journey and I think we all know it's not no so I grew up in the hotbed of international relations at Louisville Kentucky uh I went to a hippie school on a horse farm uh which turned out to be a great place if you were either a really a super nerd like me or be kicked out of every other school in town um and so I actually started studying International politics because I was watching TV and saw Deng Xiaoping visit the us so I became fascinated by China uh started taking Chinese lessons in Middle School ended up studying Chinese and college living in in Beijing in Taiwan and Hong Kong uh so I was originally a China person fascinated by all things China starting in the 70s um I did a stint at McKinsey then ended up skipping the business section of the newspaper to start focusing on foreign honestly that's a good guide of what your day job should be so I went to graduate school at Stanford stumbled into a class the first day of my PhD program because I had heard there was a very left-wing Professor teaching with a very right-wing professor at least that was the word on the street uh and I wanted to understand who these people were and one of the professors was a woman named Condoleezza Rice and she became my doctoral advisor and that's how I ended up studying National Security organizations and that's what set me on my trajectory to come back to Stanford great so uh uh you better Stanford for a number of years you're you're you're you're very focused and influential in this area what caused you to become an author and and why did you decide you want to write uh your most recent book spy slides in algorithms so this book was more than 10 years in the making it started off as a different book Steve the original book um began when I was a professor at UCLA and I pulled my students I was teaching a class on intelligence and I pulled my students about what they knew and where they learned it from and the answer was they didn't know anything and what they knew they learned from the movies uh and uh statistically significant results those who watched a lot of spy themed entertainment were much more likely to believe uh that enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding Etc were the right thing to do and then I did National polls and I found the same thing and the more I looked the more I became concerned that spy themed entertainment had become adult education so I originally set out to write intelligence 101 to use as a textbook and then I moved Stanford and the world changed and I became enmeshed in technology and so then what I realized I needed to write was Intelligence 2.0 how emerging Technologies are transforming the intelligence landscape so it took a long time to get here but I'm glad I tell my editors I'm glad I waited this long because it turned out to be a more interesting book well I I can't tell you how many different times we've been talking about technology that we've discovered to on the agencies we're working with and we use an analogy of it's like what you saw in The Matrix or it's like what you saw in this movie or you know read about in this uh uh popular novel because it really does uh uh uh it anchors a lot of people's impressions of intelligence and intelligence and Technology as you know the Q in our name comes from the character and uh the James Bond movies right so so who are we to say that uh uh uh uh uh uh we shouldn't focus on how spying is portrayed in fiction in Hollywood um but what's uh uh for our readers that haven't or for our listeners that haven't had a chance to read your book uh uh what is your takeaway about um uh how uh uh uh intelligence is portrayed in fiction in Hollywood and and how it does work in real life what is the difference that you would focus on so I like spicing entertainment just like the next person so I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here um and I think it can be useful jumping off point to start to learn about the real world of intelligence but I think there are a couple of really pervasive myths that come from entertainment that are detrimental to the intelligence business myth number one is that intelligence is secrets intelligence is not in the business of Secrets as you know intelligence is the business of insight and I know we're going to talk about open source intelligence but the more that people think that intelligence is only about Secrets the more they ignore or Overlook really important aspects of the intelligence Enterprise I think the second pervasive myth is that intelligence is as the old saying goes a rogue elephant out of control that there's no oversight that these agencies are running among and that of course there have been dark chapters in our history of intelligence but that's not the case there's a there's a robust oversight regime so I think those are the two big ones okay well let's talk about your first one because it's a point that we like to talk about a lot which is um if you think of one to be fair the traditional way the intelligence uh uh agency who are organized funded allocated resources and two also the way it's perceived I think in in Hollywood and fiction there's there's a pyramid where uh um at the top of the pyramid with sort of small amount of effort and resources is what would be characterized as as the open source uh uh uh efforts you know what can you obtain by just looking at social media networks looking at uh broadcast television in uh uh countries newspapers uh uh uh uh reading speeches you know those sorts of things and there there's a winding of effort and recess all the way down to the base which I would characterize as the classified or covert uh uh um uh uh aspects of intelligence where uh people are encouraging uh uh uh uh local citizens in a host country to uh share secrets or share access to uh uh certain things uh um that are perceived to be uh uh uh uh uh secret you know for lack of a better work when in effect I think if you look at where the world of intelligence is moving it's flipping that pyramid on its head where the vast majority of collection is going to happen in the open source around there'll be in a set of analysis or Insight uh uh uh applied to that open source by the analysts uh within the organization and then there'll be a smaller amount of resources that will use classified means uh and classified methods to obtain uh information that either can't be uh collected through open source means or needs to confirm the open source collection uh as to the truth that's the way we see the world going uh how does that resonate with you I'm nodding my head vigorously I completely agree with you and I think that transformation that inversion of the pyramid is both essential and Incredibly difficult because as you know working at incutel you know these you know our intelligence Community is used to operating in the in the classified space it's used to getting information clandestinely it's used to producing intelligence products for people with clearances so the open source Revolution isn't just about collecting differently and it's not just about analyzing differently it's about producing differently so intelligence needs to be produced increasingly for people who don't have clearances so voters for example dealing with foreign interference in elections or Tech leaders trying to understand cyber threats to and through their systems so it's I think a revolutionary challenge for the intelligence Community to reimagine how it's going to operate in a more open source world I think that's a that's a great point and I think you can look at the recent uh uh events around the conflict in Ukraine as evidence of that uh uh leading up to the invasion of the Ukraine the United States took action it was very different from what United States had done before in terms of briefing to the world if you will intelligence that it had about Russia you know and intelligence that it had about Russians uh potential actions and intentions uh uh in you know for long time observers and participants in the intelligence world I think it struck almost a little bit as well that's different that's new and I think one of the key enabling reasons that uh uh uh the US was able to do it in this case was a lot of that intelligence was gathered by open source method so you didn't have to worry as you traditionally did about burning your Source right you know like hey if we're going to disclose this piece of intelligence publicly and it came from somebody working for some foreign government somewhere who took risk you know to to share that information with us we don't want to burn that Source we don't want to uh caused them to be investigated and hunted down but if those information has been collected through open source methods uh then it's a lot easier to share that information and the US actually used that open source information to share it in ways that advanced its uh strategic objectives absolutely and I think you've hit on one of the key uh you know benefits of open source which is the shareability of information not just with people outside the U.S but across the U.S government so I spent two years I one chapter in the book where I focus on open source nuclear threat intelligence and I spent two years on that one chapter I think it's a really important set of issues and one of the things I found is the leaders in this open source Community including some of my colleagues at Stanford really believe in what they're doing in large part because the of the importance of shareability and what they talk about is when something is so highly classified and typically nuclear threats are highly classified there are fewer eyes on the information and that means that you don't get as good analysis uh as as you could and so that shareability piece is key but I want to say something else about the the what you mentioned Steve about the declassification of intelligence with Ukraine I think it's a crucial paradigm shift and I think the context here of sharing it let me start again I think the context here is important because it's about information Warfare it's not just about intelligence and so the declassification of intelligence was about getting the truth out before the lie and the sequencing of information is important when the truth comes out first people more likely to believe it when the lie comes out first people are more likely to believe it so I think this strategy of uh the US government saying don't believe what Vladimir Putin is about to tell you was a brilliant idea on a number of dimensions I think that's a another fantastic point uh we are in an era of information and warfare uh we are seeing uh both adversaries both China and Russia I think act in that way Russia is probably more visible and advanced uh uh uh today in it but China's playing ketchup and and becoming very good and and to your point it's impossible to counteract that uh those efforts by saying that's not true but we can't tell you you know uh uh uh uh uh what really is true because that's the secret and you're not clear for it right that's that's just a very debilitating message uh to send out uh uh uh uh to to anybody and so I think we are uh uh as you you said in this Paradigm Shift where uh are experiencing on Paradigm Shift where the world of intelligence is going to have to be more openly discussed you know how this information was sourced how it was analyzed and why the conclusions uh uh uh will come to you can also look at the uh all the different conspiracy theories in conversations around the origin of the uh covered virus as another sample of uh look there were lots of different stories out there in the US government initial reaction to that was you know just to make a blanket statement and not sort of offer any justification or background as to how it came to that conclusion and that didn't carry the day uh uh with the uh uh uh worldwide public opinion let alone the U.S public opinion so so I think that was where the world's going and to your point it's a cultural shift that you know some of the agencies and some of the long-time practitioners are struggling with because that's not the way it always was have we seen any examples of this in Hollywood or fiction of people getting it right and and and and demonstrating this I I don't know the answer to this I can't think of anything else if there are examples in Hollywood it's a lone individual working against the evil bureaucracy in order to get the truth of that right right exactly exactly so um uh so moving on from uh uh the open source topic uh uh let me ask you uh because a lot of our listeners obviously care about uh uh what emerging Technologies are coming that are important here uh what do you see today that are the ones that the National Security Community should be paying the most attention to and adapting uh uh uh uh uh to to Really uh support and uh extend this trend that we've been talking about that is such a critical question Steve I wish I had a really cogent answer I think it's important to realize that I don't think anybody has a clear answer if you look at the list of critical Technologies released by various government agencies they're so broad as to be meaningless it's all of AI all of Robotics any emerging technology you can think of and so I think the implicit strategy here is that we have to compete on every technology everywhere in order to win and I think that strategy is doomed to failure and so the one of the projects I'm working on now with a colleague named herb Lin who's a physicist um here at Stanford is how do we have a more segmented competition strategy on what emerging Technologies must we win what parts of AI are the most important to actually be first where should we be fast followers where is it better to be second than first and then there's a third category that to me is the most intriguing which is on what emerging Technologies should we be deliberately luring China into competing because they're competition traps where China will exert enormous Talent effort political Capital without marginal gain and even better what are competition tracks where China knows their traps but competes anyway because of matters of prestige or bureaucracy and I think we have some examples from history but herb and I are delving deeply into specific technological areas to try to bucket those Technologies into those three categories I think that's fascinating in the last category I hadn't really given a lot of photo but uh in the spartacity wants to save the coin but uh uh uh you know I think or cryptocurrencies but uh or blockchain I guess you know uh but uh I I think there's a lot of uh uh um uh there's a lot of interesting um uh uh things to think about there uh uh and that's what I love about guests is when they make me think let me throw out a couple areas uh uh that I'll reserved and you get your reaction to them first is I think when you move to a world of great open source collection uh one of the challenges is most uh intelligence is not in English it's in the language of the host uh uh uh uh uh countries and so one of the areas I think uh uh we as a community are challenged with is translation at Large Scale you know so if you're collecting a lot of Chinese or Korean or Russian documents the ability to uh automatically uh uh translate those documents at scale uh uh uh find the the pieces of info in there that are actually pertinent uh to the intelligence mission in and and Elevate them to such that a human could then take a look at him and apply the human brain to uh uh uh to develop the Insight that's uh uh I think a real challenge uh uh for us we're really good at collecting we're not really good at translating uh uh um and so I think that's an area out there uh uh with a lot of some some very interesting companies uh uh uh doing some good work uh there the second uh obviously uh area I would observe also is in the general area of collection platforms you know how do you collect when you're collecting for open source as opposed to uh when you're trying to collect for uh classified uh information I think there is a difference in the types of platforms uh that you uh create and operate uh to do that and I think you if you have to start with a mission you know in your head uh at the very beginning with white sheet of paper as you build these platforms to to build the best platforms and I don't think enough people are doing that they're trying to sort of retrofit or optimize platforms built for classified collection to do open source collection so so I think those are two um uh areas that I would observe are interesting places to play I don't know if you have any reactions to that I would agree with you I think one of the things that is often missing and conversation is a system so open source isn't just stuff it's not just information that the IC needs to bring more into what it does it's a set of organizations and individuals and one of the questions is where's the where's the belly button in the in the community for open source leaders responsible open source leaders to access the classified world how can we actually shape Norms standards ethical guidelines for open source collectors and analysts right now this is a relatively benign environment it's dominated by American and Allied companies and individuals but that's not going to stay that way and if we look 10 or 20 years in the future what is the open source world look like it's going to be a lot less benign than it is today so how do we even shape those standards and training so that we have the most responsible players actually self-governing in a way that is advantageous to the United States yeah I think those are some great points so let's I'll move on to our next topic then uh obviously your background is very deep in the cyber security uh area uh can you uh uh talk a little bit about uh uh the part that you think cyber security plays in great power competition and and we can talk a little bit about you know some of the changes that we're seeing there so yeah I wish we had another hour we could talk all about cyber so I think you know it's interesting Steve because I looked you know it's 10 years since cyber was listed in the top threats of the dni annual threat assessment and so I've spent some time thinking about will we get right in cyber and what do we get wrong in cyber over the past 10 years and the answer is if you go back to that 2012 uh Director of National Intelligence threat assessment they identified cyber as a top threat and they identified the main actors in cyberspace focusing particularly on Russia and China but I think the Cyber threat has morphed in ways that nobody anticipated so the two big things that we collectively academics policy makers Intelligence Officers we got wrong there are two big things we got wrong one was that cyber would look like Warfare as we knew it that it would be big it would be obvious the threshold would be clear uh Leon Panetta when he was Secretary of Defense talked about a cyber Pearl Harbor in 2012 that would lead to physical effects and of course we know if you fast forward five years from there there was a cyber surprise in our election uh but it was hacking Minds not just machines and so I think you know so the first thing is cyber War would be obvious and it hasn't been obvious it's been at the below the threshold of War the second piece which I just alluded to is we focused on machines and not minds and so the deception at scale that is enabled by cyberspace is something that's really new yes we've had deception before deception's as old as Espionage but not at the speed and scale that we're confronting and so I think those are emerging challenges in cyberspace okay and actually they tied together right the whole deep fake issue is a cyber security issue but it's also an open source uh uh uh uh coaching analysis uh issue as well and you know it could uh be very scary when you see some of these demos that we're all seeing right now of of of of these deep fakes uh one of the things we haven't talked about necessarily is the relative abilities of different nations you know in these areas have you thought at all about you know where you think Russia is strongest in where you think Russia's weakest in China's strongest in China's weakness weakest in and where the US is as well as we we think about you know this competition that we're engaged with going forward here where do we need get better and where do we need to be scared I guess it's the short version of that question well I wish I had I don't have access to enough classified information to be able to answer that question sufficiently um I can tell you just based on the unclassified World there are a couple things I think that concern me number one the US is one of the most capable actors in cyberspace we know that but we're simultaneously one of the most vulnerable countries in cyberspace so part of the challenge is we have asymmetric vulnerability um because we're so digitally connected and because we have such wide freedom of speech on the internet so we're inherently more vulnerable than other states so North Korea hacks Sony Pictures it's a national security incident North Korea's internet goes down and nobody notices because North Korea only had 28 websites at the time right so that's number one I think number two is we operate by different norms right and so and and we should operate by different Norms we're a democracy we believe in the truth we believe in the rule of law so we're just not going to do some things that our adversaries are going to do so China for example we know is really good at stealing intellectual property they've been robbing Us blind for years uh we as you know better than I do the intelligence Community does not conduct Espionage on behalf of specific companies we just don't do it some of our allies do but we don't and we're not going to so I think there are some differences there but with those differences also come advantages right so you know we have some you know you're living one of the advantages which is the Innovation ecosystem that we have in the United States in particular in Silicon Valley and so that's an enduring strength right the freedom to innovate the freedom to be wrong the freedom to fail I think is likely to be a long-term Advantage for us in the Cyber conflict I I think that's a a fantastic answering uh you also start to touch on a point I wanted to go to next which is one of the ways we think about relative strengths and capabilities of these uh Nations is by Talent you know and where you know who is developing uh uh what talent in in which country and as an educator I'm sure that's uh near and dear to your heart uh uh what do you think the U.S can do better to develop the uh uh the number of technical Minds in the areas that we've we've discussed here uh uh uh to really continue to be a a worldwide leader you know in the these capabilities so Talent is near and dear to my heart I will tell you that you know I wrote this book spies lies and algorithms because I wanted to teach a class at Stanford and my real goal in teaching the class at Stanford is to encourage engineering students and there are many of them here to think about International Security early in their careers which gets to the talent piece I think there are a few things that the IC needs to do differently number one they need to think about recruitment from a different frame so recruitment in the IEC is how can we fill this Billet at this exact moment in time with this specific person but what recruitment should be is how can we make sure that whoever is interested in applying for a job in the IC will support us for the rest of their lives no matter where they end up so and this is particularly true of tech Talent so if they don't move into the IC you want ambassadors not just lifers inside so that's a different frame of how you think about Talent recruitment which gets to point number two which is do the small things right and that starts with stop using fax machines in your recruitment efforts nothing says we are in the dinosaur era for a tech an engineering major thinking about applying to a job in the intelligence Community then having an agency say why don't you fax us your information honest to goodness you know some of these agencies still use faxes so stop doing that it sends the wrong message and then third I think you know we have to reduce the pain points so clearances I know director Burns is really focused on this clearances take too long especially with tech Talent they have lots of different offers lots of different opportunities you can't make them wait that long to walk in the door um I actually think one of our strategies needs to be and I proposed this before that we need a fellowship program that's like a White House fellows program for the top 50 engineering students graduating across the country but the key to making something like that work is to understand as you know living in the valley young Engineers care about their peers it's their peer Network that really matters and if you have the top engineering students wherever they end up in this cohort of this program for a year working inside even if they don't end up becoming lifers and they go to Google or they go to startups their friends are influenced by their experience and that's a way to to win hearts and Minds across different companies and industries I think that's a great Point uh uh uh I think it'd be a fantastic program but to your second Point uh uh we need to fix the clearance process first or otherwise they won't be able to do anything in that one year we'll be waiting for their crash to come through so uh I think we've exceeded our time here which happens when we have a great conversation so thank you very much I always like to offer my guests uh two things first uh uh is there anything else that you wish you had a chance to mention in this conversation that you haven't uh such a great question uh I no I think you covered it a lot of territory very quickly okay great and then secondly uh where can our listeners find out more about you and your work if they get intrigued by uh what they uh are hearing here is there anything you currently work on that you want to highlight or you know a website or blog post uh uh that you publish uh where should they look for more so um so this uh competition traps project stay tuned for that uh I would just uh suggest two other things I do tweet about uh Stanford Sports and intelligence issues on Twitter um and then I co-chair a group at Hoover that's really looking at the intersection of these issues called the technology economics and governance working group and I co-chair it with economist John Taylor uh and we're having a lot more speaker series and events and things and so if people want to engage in our work we would welcome them terrific terrific and I'll be at the Stanford football game this weekend so we'll see if they can actually fall off a win exactly all right thank you and to you thank you all for turning tuning in to today's episode of the intersection please make sure to subscribe to the iqt podcast so you don't miss out on future content and leave us a review or comment to let us know what you think or what content you'd be interested to see us cover on a future podcast I'd also encourage you to check out the iqt's website www.iqt.org to explore more content about Cutting Edge technology to support and deliver insights and capabilities essential for National Security and motion impact as always we're all about the intersection of National Security and technology and please uh uh uh uh thank you Amy for taking the time here to join us in the conversation I think our listeners will be fascinated by what they get to Europe thank you thanks so much Steve foreign [Music]