October 8, 2025 • 24 mins
This week, we check in on the CIA and how it’s faring in the age of AI. Oz sits down with David Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post to discuss his article, “A Band of Innovators Reimagines the Spy Game for a World with No Cover.” Ignatius has been covering US foreign policy and the CIA for almost four decades and he recently had a realization – that the “future of intelligence was going to be written in zeros and ones.” Which means the intelligence community needs to adapt and adapt quickly. But how does a government agency do this and what happens if it doesn’t? And who is responsible for dragging the bureaucracy-addled CIA into the AI future?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. I'm as
Volosen here with Cara Price. Hi as Hi Cara. So
I've been very, very excited about today's story. It's a
deep dive with the author of a column that has
the headline A band of innovators reimagines the spy game
for a world with no cover. Here's the author.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
It began to realize that the future of intelligence was
going to be written in zeros and ones, that it
was going to become a technology war an algorithm.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So the story is by David Ignatius. He's a journalist
at the Washington Post with the reputation of knowing the
inside workings of the CIA better than almost anyone else
in the world. One of the things I love about
doing tech stuff is that we get to look under
the hood of how tech is revolutionizing places that you
might not expect, in some cases the most unexpected places,
(01:12):
one of which is, as we insiders like to call it,
the agency, the CIA. And what's interesting about David's piece
is that it's clear spycraft itself. Is it an inflection
point because of AI?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
So tell me a little bit more about why this
cut your interest.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Well, I grew up as a boy in Britain and
have become a British Man. So of course James Bond
fantasies are totally organic to who I became as a person.
But I'm just beyond intrigued by this conceptually, because traditional
spycraft was all about obscuring your identity from other people.
Like all those crazy disguises and prosthetics and stuff you
(01:50):
see in movies like Mitchell Impossible, They're all based on
real CIA technologies, or at least many of them are.
And David told me that the art of disguise has
gotten so good that you can easily change your race,
even your gender. And that's just the stuff we know about.
But now intelligence agencies are facing a radical new problem,
which is how do you trig a machine?
Speaker 3 (02:12):
So while you might have a mask that completely changes
your appearance, a retina scan or a fingerprint could completely
blow your cover.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That's right. So the story began with a guy who
worked with the CIA who warned a few years ago
that computer vision would soon be able to identify people
at a far off distance just based on the signature
of how they walked. It's called gate analysis, and at
the time he was laughed out of the room as
a scaremonger, but it turns out he'd actually seen into
(02:41):
the future. It's almost impossible nowadays for humans through outsmart
machines because of something that David called, and I love
this phrase, digital dust. What that refers to is the
data signatures we leave behind no matter how hard we try.
Here's the real kicker. Not leaving digital dust could be
just as revealing as leaving it. In the past, spies
(03:04):
could slip under cover with just a story. But now
if they don't have decades of online activity LinkedIn Instagram, Facebook, etc.
To support that story, it just doesn't make any sense
to their adversaries. In fact, as David put it, the
harder you try to hide, the more visible you become.
And all of this leads to some existential questions about
(03:25):
the future of spying. How does a CIA adapt, what
happens if it doesn't, and who's responsible for dragging into
the future. One of those people is the guy I mentioned,
the person who warned about data analysis. He's now innovating
on the outside and trying to set into the CIA.
But to start with, I wanted to know about how
the CIA has tried to adapt already and how it's going.
(03:47):
Here's my conversation with David Ignatius. You chart in the
piece how a number of poorly executed technological ideas have
led to networks being dismantled in places like China and Iran.
I assume by networks being dismantled that means people getting
arrested and maybe even killed, and that only killed.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Some of the executions were ruesomely done in ways to
make sure that our overhead satellites can see them. So
it is true that our attempts to come up with
clever technologies have sometimes been half baked. I'll give you
an example that's been published by me and others. The
(04:32):
agency had a seemingly very clever method for communicating with
recruited agents, where it would give them access to computer
websites that fit their personalities. Let's suppose somebody was a
Liverpool soccer fan, so it'll be a Liverpool fan site.
But embedded in that fan site was a template for
(04:56):
communicating directly and very secretly through the Internet through a VPN,
a hole in the Internet back to Langley. The problem
was that these things all had the same back end electronically,
so once you stripped away the nominal cover. You know,
there were ones for Rasta fans in the West Indies,
(05:19):
there were ones for Cut three music fans. I mean,
if you can go to dozens of the dedicated sites,
but they all had the same back end, which was
really about covert communications. And in both Iran and China
this secret was assessed and then ruthlessly exploited. So you
(05:40):
have to be careful with technology. When you think you're
being smart, you have to go back and look at
it again because you may simply be being obvious in
a different way you hadn't considered.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
One of the other examples that comes up in the
piece is American Kamando's I believe in Syria who whose
cell phones came from Fort Bragg, right, And so it
was very easy for an external pologies to locate where
they were.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So there was a very secret location in northeastern Syria,
in the Kurdish controlled area. I know about it because
I probably went there five times as an embed with
the Joint Special Operations Command, which is our most secret
and really our best military force, which is running operations
(06:29):
there to destroy Isis. Remember how frightening ISIS was so
a well meaning guy who was in the commercial advertising business,
whose business was picking up the little emissions from your
cell phones that tell ways where you are on the highway,
what cop car has pulled over. He wanted to help
(06:52):
refugees who were fleeing Syria those early in the early
days of the world. So I just bought from Syria
telcom companies bought all this data. Is very cheap because
nobody had any commercial applications whatsoever for that area. And
then he overlaid telephones in the area of Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, which is where Jaysack and all of our
most secret units operate, and he found there were all
(07:17):
these things at the cement factory, supposedly an abandoned French
cement factory. The advertisers just were like, oh my god,
look at all this. So there's an example where commercial
innovation just was much faster than the creativity or the
ability to detect new threats and opportunities on the intelligence side.
(07:42):
And that illustrates I think what in some ways OZ
is that is the biggest and most positive change that's happened.
Starting in nineteen ninety nine, then CI director George Tenne
was very foresighted and seeing that the CIA is falling
behind the pace of innovation of Silicon Valley. Tenant had
a good sense to create a CIA venture capital fund,
(08:05):
which he called ink Tel, and rather than getting the
usual Intel bureaucrat to run it, he went outside and
picked him in named Gilman Louie, who'd been running a
video game company, and Gilman Louie began going out and
looking for smart ideas that could help in intelligence missions,
(08:28):
recognizing that the pace of innovation in the private sectors
simply couldn't be matched by government. The government had to
find a way to use these technologies, if possible, work
with the people who were creating them. So that got
the intelligence communitee operating at the speed of innovation, if
you will, and I think has certainly accelerated the pace
(08:51):
of change that's happened in Britain a lot of our allies.
So this began with a good idea of George Tennant's.
But now I think pretty much universally understood that the
intelligence world wants totally closed, has to connect with this
wildly open and innovative world of talking about.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I saw in your piece those investments in Paneteer and Enderrail,
and presumably if you were a venture investor, you would
be beyond cockahoop with those returns. As the CIA, though
I mean financial performances is great, but as a CIA
in some sense threatening its own relevance by outsourcing so
much innovation.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
As the private sector, the CIA, they're trying to keep up.
They have technical advisory boards and they has some very
patriotic people and in tech companies work with them. We
have this interesting problem that Elon Musk, to take one example,
came up with an extraordinarily powerful system Starlink with now
(09:54):
three thousand dollars satellites and lowerthorbit providing broadbeam signals over everywhere,
and that became the command and control network for the
Ukrainian military. But that then puts enormous power in the
hands of a private sector entrepreneurs. So what happens if
Eli Musk decides I have to sell teslas in China,
(10:17):
I have to make teslas and shine. I don't want to.
I'm sick of this. Ukraine will war, right, So I'm
going to cut off their ability to get those signals.
There have been moments when he's in fact threatened to
do that and then just pulled back. But it just
illustrates that the use of private technology is a double
edged sword. Yes, it accelerates the pace of your ability
to innovate, but it makes you more dependent on these
(10:39):
entrepreneurs who hopefully share your national interests and will protect
and advance your secret advantage. But you can't be sure
of that, and so that's a puzzle. I think people
are still struggling with.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Characterize where the CIA is on these issues and questions
that you've been raising, because the sense I get from
the piece is that you feel their way behind. I mean,
there's this great quote from a former CIA director, David Norman,
who says, if Henry Ford had gone to transportation customers
and us what they wanted, the would have said faster horses.
(11:15):
That's what the CIA has been trying to build, faster horses,
and it's pretty damning.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It is pretty damning. So they deny that they're as
out of it as a piece suggests. The question is
how fast you can move to fully adapt It can
be aware of something, but fully adapt to it. As
a different matter, people are still trying to I think
(11:39):
faster or worse. It is a little unfair, but they're
still trying to think about within the existing paradigm for espionage.
How can we do it better? How do we hide better?
How do we find ways to capture their signals without
being observed ourselves? But what's needed, people say, is something
really very new, a whole new way of thinking about operating.
(12:00):
Is John Ratcliffe, the CI director of a person who's creative,
disruptive enough to orchestrate that transformation. We'll see, But legacy
systems have a momentum sort of weight that Look at
aircraft carriers in the Navy. I mean, it's twenty years ago.
We knew that they were all vulnerable. They disappeared the
(12:21):
first minutes or hours of any attack. But they're still
out there, and good luck trying to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Them after the break the story, even elite soldier to
tech founder who's creating an AI souperagent, stay with us. Yeah,
(12:59):
this's light in the p The CIA's technology challenge is
a little noted example of a transformation that's happening in
every area of defense and security today. Smart machines can
outweit humans now, even for Tim Cook, even for the
CEOs of silicon value based technology companies, knowing how to
balance defending the core product with integrating this wave of
(13:23):
new technology that is so fast moving. Even Google is
struggling with it. How does a government organization saddled with
the bureaucracy that even the most forward thinking government organizations
come with. Is there an overall strategic response to this problem?
Is crisis?
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So I think the obvious answer is that new ideas
in the intelligence business that are really powerful, that allow
you to collect secrets that you didn't have before, that
open new areas for collection and analysis become irresistible. These
secrets are so powerful once you learn to read somebody's mail,
(14:06):
listening to their phone calls, it's resistible. Because policymakers, once
they've got that conversation between the General secretary and his
chief of staff, they want it. They want to get
the good stuff. So there's always a demand for policy
makers for the very best intelligence. And if technology can
allow people to get more of that or sustain the
(14:29):
flow of it, certainly the demand will be there. I
just wouldn't note if you look at what the CIA
and other agencies were able to know about Russian intentions
in late twenty twenty one, when Europe and even Ukraine
said no, the Russians aren't going to attack, and Bill
(14:51):
Burns and his colleagues kept going out and saying, yes
they are, and that they had detailed intelligence. They were
reading Russian intentions like a phone book. It's still not
clear just how they had such precise intelligence, but they
knew right where they were coming out. How Ukraine in
the early days of the war was able to be
(15:12):
so successful. We knew where they were coming. They were
coming to the airport just west of Kiev. We knew
exactly what they were going to try to do and
ban there were people there waiting for them, and they
just took them out. But the electronic coordination of all
the systems that have to have to operate simultaneously we
don't think about. You know, if you've got an hour
of time and you've got all these different multiple fires,
(15:35):
different drones, different systems that cannot be done by human beings,
too complicated. So there's a way in which the war
in Ukraine was an algorithm and the complex systems for
handling data that's never been done in the warfare before.
That is something of that complexity managed electronically simultaneously. You've
never seen that before.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
So the diagnosis is actually rumors of the demise maybe
over exaggerating. What you're really looking at in the piece
is more continued relevance in a five to ten year horizon.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
So I'm looking at the people who were trying to
change the paradigm. But the point that should encourage people,
if you're an American, you have to say that is
there are a lot of really smart people out there.
Many of them got frustrated being the CI. It's pretty
bureaucratic these days, got a little political, to put a
mild late so people say. And they're out there trying
(16:31):
to create companies that are going to be good for
their former colleagues, solve problems that they couldn't solve while
they were in an operation, and so people are coming
up with, as I say, quite innovative ideas.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Talk a bit about Aaron Brown's story, if you don't mind,
how you first met him, how his insights within the
agency were rejected, and how he came to design Lumbra
and even engage with Samiltman in the very early days
of chat Chipet's release.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Brown was an Army ranger and if you don't know
anything about what they do at ranger school, you know
these are the guys who can climb up a cliff
face and run ten miles or a fifty pound pack
on their back and get in and out of incredible places.
They're tough fighters and end up going to these special units,
(17:21):
And like many very good soldiers, Aaron ended up getting
cut to the CI and worked in its counter terrorism
operations in the days of the pursuit of wassamb B
and Laud. All the while he was with a deep
engineer's interest in electronics, was trying to think about the
tools of his craft and whether they were adequate. And
(17:42):
when the bin laden work was done, he began to
worry about the vulnerability of officers overseas to this technology
that could recognize the way they walked. And just think
about it. If you've got recordings of everybody enters all
the airports of China, everybody who enters the US embassy,
or all the consulates that we have, you could end
(18:04):
up having a library that you can then run against
people all over China. You see, well, where that guy
from the US embassy, what's he doing in chung Du?
Why do you go to that forest that's ten miles
out of town. What's going on here? So he left
the agency year eighteen months ago and with a friend
started this company, Lumbra, And his basic idea is that
(18:29):
it's not simply these magnificent ais that are moving towards
what we call superintelligence without being quite sure what that means.
But computers that begin to be able to think in
real human like ways and begin to give themselves instructions,
maybe by writing their own programs, begin to be able
(18:49):
to speak to each other. It's one thing super intelligence
will be able to do. And his insight was that
just as our brilliant brains need hands, legs, the ability
to get to what we need to assemble to then process,
computers are going to need agents agentic AI that will
help them assemble that disparate pieces of information, think and
(19:13):
then analyze and make sense of it. No human being could.
So he decided that that was his going to be
his area, this central nervous system that's going to connect
the AI brain with all the other parts of the
system that will make it most effective. He in turn
introduced me to other friends, a guy who was thinking
(19:35):
about this problem of how our cell phones give off
our identity, but we still have to communicate, So how
our officers going to communicate without giving away their position.
And it turns out he came up with an incredibly
ingenious technology that essentially the three or four levels of
identifiers in our phones were not aware of that give
off our identification, but kind a way to bounce those
(19:57):
identifiers among the different a thousands of users of his system,
so you can't really tell where any particular signal is
coming from, even if you capture it. It's called Cape.
Third company that interesting to me was called Strider. It's
based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Essentially, what they're doing
(20:18):
is reading other people's digital dust. We're not the only
ones who leave digital dust. The Chinese are so intent
on monitoring their own population. They've got cameras on every
street and it's not to watch us, is to watch
Chinese people. And it turns out that that's an entry
way for companies like Strider to collect an amazing amount
(20:39):
of information. I mean, I've looked at it what they
can get, and it's it's pretty incredible. Imagine how long
it would take you to do that kind of forensics
in a free digital world. So that's something that that
company is doing. They think they probably do it better
than any internal agency in the government. The fact that
(21:00):
they were willing to talk about it with me in detail,
I didn't sneak them in the telling me, it means
that they're fairly confident they can continue to do it.
So those are three little examples of companies that are
playing around at the frontier, and I hope people will
find that encouraging. I would hate to think that we
were just a slumbering, sloppy giant with the intelligence equivalent
(21:23):
of aircraft carriers just sitting there away and get blown
out of the water. I don't want that.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
We've talked a lot about concerns about the CIA falling
behind technologically. Do you have any concerns about a swing
too hot in the other direction and onboarding too many
untested private technologies that could create risk either to American
citizens or systems risk. I mean, what's the kind of
flip side concern and everything we've been talking about.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So, you know, this is a period where we're seeing
that the powers of government can be misused in what
to me are quite disturbing. When is you know, when
law enforcement is federalized, you see overreach, and you could
see a technological version of that overreach. You could see
(22:09):
the application of facial recognition software. In China, a citizens
can't go out of his town without permission. He gets
a score based on his performance at work, rating his
social merit. He gets a little gold star if he's
a dutiful citizens supporting the Chinese Communist Party. We don't
(22:31):
want that, and we don't want our schools, I don't
think to become rigid in what they instruct We want creativity,
not uniformity, and these tools can create uniformity sadly. So
you know, we have to remember that the power of
our federal government is overwhelming and that we want it
(22:53):
to be strong in dealing with our adversaries. But if
that power begins to be used against American citizens or
inappropriate ways around the world, everybody should be watching. So
that's I think my biggest challenge is a journalist. I
think this revolution is needed and beneficial, but I think
the dangers are ones that we have to keep in mind.
(23:16):
It can't be so worried about the danger you just
to stop and say we're not going to do it.
That would be a mistake. But you do have to
be eventualan all the time about what could happen.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Well, David Nations, thank you so much for joining us
on text us today for a fascinating conversation, and I
hope you'll join us again before too long.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
With pleasure Us. Thank you very much for.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Text Stuff. I amost Forelosian and I'm care Price. This
episode was Preduce Spy, Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill.
It was executive produced by Me, Karen Price, and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack
Insley makes this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Join us on Friday for the week in tech as
and I will run through the tech headlines you may
have missed. Please rate, review, and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. I'm as
Volosen here with Cara Price. Hi as Hi Cara. So
I've been very, very excited about today's story. It's a
deep dive with the author of a column that has
the headline A band of innovators reimagines the spy game
for a world with no cover. Here's the author.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
It began to realize that the future of intelligence was
going to be written in zeros and ones, that it
was going to become a technology war an algorithm.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So the story is by David Ignatius. He's a journalist
at the Washington Post with the reputation of knowing the
inside workings of the CIA better than almost anyone else
in the world. One of the things I love about
doing tech stuff is that we get to look under
the hood of how tech is revolutionizing places that you
might not expect, in some cases the most unexpected places,
(01:12):
one of which is, as we insiders like to call it,
the agency, the CIA. And what's interesting about David's piece
is that it's clear spycraft itself. Is it an inflection
point because of AI?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
So tell me a little bit more about why this
cut your interest.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Well, I grew up as a boy in Britain and
have become a British Man. So of course James Bond
fantasies are totally organic to who I became as a person.
But I'm just beyond intrigued by this conceptually, because traditional
spycraft was all about obscuring your identity from other people.
Like all those crazy disguises and prosthetics and stuff you
(01:50):
see in movies like Mitchell Impossible, They're all based on
real CIA technologies, or at least many of them are.
And David told me that the art of disguise has
gotten so good that you can easily change your race,
even your gender. And that's just the stuff we know about.
But now intelligence agencies are facing a radical new problem,
which is how do you trig a machine?
Speaker 3 (02:12):
So while you might have a mask that completely changes
your appearance, a retina scan or a fingerprint could completely
blow your cover.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
That's right. So the story began with a guy who
worked with the CIA who warned a few years ago
that computer vision would soon be able to identify people
at a far off distance just based on the signature
of how they walked. It's called gate analysis, and at
the time he was laughed out of the room as
a scaremonger, but it turns out he'd actually seen into
(02:41):
the future. It's almost impossible nowadays for humans through outsmart
machines because of something that David called, and I love
this phrase, digital dust. What that refers to is the
data signatures we leave behind no matter how hard we try.
Here's the real kicker. Not leaving digital dust could be
just as revealing as leaving it. In the past, spies
(03:04):
could slip under cover with just a story. But now
if they don't have decades of online activity LinkedIn Instagram, Facebook, etc.
To support that story, it just doesn't make any sense
to their adversaries. In fact, as David put it, the
harder you try to hide, the more visible you become.
And all of this leads to some existential questions about
(03:25):
the future of spying. How does a CIA adapt, what
happens if it doesn't, and who's responsible for dragging into
the future. One of those people is the guy I mentioned,
the person who warned about data analysis. He's now innovating
on the outside and trying to set into the CIA.
But to start with, I wanted to know about how
the CIA has tried to adapt already and how it's going.
(03:47):
Here's my conversation with David Ignatius. You chart in the
piece how a number of poorly executed technological ideas have
led to networks being dismantled in places like China and Iran.
I assume by networks being dismantled that means people getting
arrested and maybe even killed, and that only killed.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Some of the executions were ruesomely done in ways to
make sure that our overhead satellites can see them. So
it is true that our attempts to come up with
clever technologies have sometimes been half baked. I'll give you
an example that's been published by me and others. The
(04:32):
agency had a seemingly very clever method for communicating with
recruited agents, where it would give them access to computer
websites that fit their personalities. Let's suppose somebody was a
Liverpool soccer fan, so it'll be a Liverpool fan site.
But embedded in that fan site was a template for
(04:56):
communicating directly and very secretly through the Internet through a VPN,
a hole in the Internet back to Langley. The problem
was that these things all had the same back end electronically,
so once you stripped away the nominal cover. You know,
there were ones for Rasta fans in the West Indies,
(05:19):
there were ones for Cut three music fans. I mean,
if you can go to dozens of the dedicated sites,
but they all had the same back end, which was
really about covert communications. And in both Iran and China
this secret was assessed and then ruthlessly exploited. So you
(05:40):
have to be careful with technology. When you think you're
being smart, you have to go back and look at
it again because you may simply be being obvious in
a different way you hadn't considered.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
One of the other examples that comes up in the
piece is American Kamando's I believe in Syria who whose
cell phones came from Fort Bragg, right, And so it
was very easy for an external pologies to locate where
they were.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
So there was a very secret location in northeastern Syria,
in the Kurdish controlled area. I know about it because
I probably went there five times as an embed with
the Joint Special Operations Command, which is our most secret
and really our best military force, which is running operations
(06:29):
there to destroy Isis. Remember how frightening ISIS was so
a well meaning guy who was in the commercial advertising business,
whose business was picking up the little emissions from your
cell phones that tell ways where you are on the highway,
what cop car has pulled over. He wanted to help
(06:52):
refugees who were fleeing Syria those early in the early
days of the world. So I just bought from Syria
telcom companies bought all this data. Is very cheap because
nobody had any commercial applications whatsoever for that area. And
then he overlaid telephones in the area of Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, which is where Jaysack and all of our
most secret units operate, and he found there were all
(07:17):
these things at the cement factory, supposedly an abandoned French
cement factory. The advertisers just were like, oh my god,
look at all this. So there's an example where commercial
innovation just was much faster than the creativity or the
ability to detect new threats and opportunities on the intelligence side.
(07:42):
And that illustrates I think what in some ways OZ
is that is the biggest and most positive change that's happened.
Starting in nineteen ninety nine, then CI director George Tenne
was very foresighted and seeing that the CIA is falling
behind the pace of innovation of Silicon Valley. Tenant had
a good sense to create a CIA venture capital fund,
(08:05):
which he called ink Tel, and rather than getting the
usual Intel bureaucrat to run it, he went outside and
picked him in named Gilman Louie, who'd been running a
video game company, and Gilman Louie began going out and
looking for smart ideas that could help in intelligence missions,
(08:28):
recognizing that the pace of innovation in the private sectors
simply couldn't be matched by government. The government had to
find a way to use these technologies, if possible, work
with the people who were creating them. So that got
the intelligence communitee operating at the speed of innovation, if
you will, and I think has certainly accelerated the pace
(08:51):
of change that's happened in Britain a lot of our allies.
So this began with a good idea of George Tennant's.
But now I think pretty much universally understood that the
intelligence world wants totally closed, has to connect with this
wildly open and innovative world of talking about.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I saw in your piece those investments in Paneteer and Enderrail,
and presumably if you were a venture investor, you would
be beyond cockahoop with those returns. As the CIA, though
I mean financial performances is great, but as a CIA
in some sense threatening its own relevance by outsourcing so
much innovation.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
As the private sector, the CIA, they're trying to keep up.
They have technical advisory boards and they has some very
patriotic people and in tech companies work with them. We
have this interesting problem that Elon Musk, to take one example,
came up with an extraordinarily powerful system Starlink with now
(09:54):
three thousand dollars satellites and lowerthorbit providing broadbeam signals over everywhere,
and that became the command and control network for the
Ukrainian military. But that then puts enormous power in the
hands of a private sector entrepreneurs. So what happens if
Eli Musk decides I have to sell teslas in China,
(10:17):
I have to make teslas and shine. I don't want to.
I'm sick of this. Ukraine will war, right, So I'm
going to cut off their ability to get those signals.
There have been moments when he's in fact threatened to
do that and then just pulled back. But it just
illustrates that the use of private technology is a double
edged sword. Yes, it accelerates the pace of your ability
to innovate, but it makes you more dependent on these
(10:39):
entrepreneurs who hopefully share your national interests and will protect
and advance your secret advantage. But you can't be sure
of that, and so that's a puzzle. I think people
are still struggling with.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Characterize where the CIA is on these issues and questions
that you've been raising, because the sense I get from
the piece is that you feel their way behind. I mean,
there's this great quote from a former CIA director, David Norman,
who says, if Henry Ford had gone to transportation customers
and us what they wanted, the would have said faster horses.
(11:15):
That's what the CIA has been trying to build, faster horses,
and it's pretty damning.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It is pretty damning. So they deny that they're as
out of it as a piece suggests. The question is
how fast you can move to fully adapt It can
be aware of something, but fully adapt to it. As
a different matter, people are still trying to I think
(11:39):
faster or worse. It is a little unfair, but they're
still trying to think about within the existing paradigm for espionage.
How can we do it better? How do we hide better?
How do we find ways to capture their signals without
being observed ourselves? But what's needed, people say, is something
really very new, a whole new way of thinking about operating.
(12:00):
Is John Ratcliffe, the CI director of a person who's creative,
disruptive enough to orchestrate that transformation. We'll see, But legacy
systems have a momentum sort of weight that Look at
aircraft carriers in the Navy. I mean, it's twenty years ago.
We knew that they were all vulnerable. They disappeared the
(12:21):
first minutes or hours of any attack. But they're still
out there, and good luck trying to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Them after the break the story, even elite soldier to
tech founder who's creating an AI souperagent, stay with us. Yeah,
(12:59):
this's light in the p The CIA's technology challenge is
a little noted example of a transformation that's happening in
every area of defense and security today. Smart machines can
outweit humans now, even for Tim Cook, even for the
CEOs of silicon value based technology companies, knowing how to
balance defending the core product with integrating this wave of
(13:23):
new technology that is so fast moving. Even Google is
struggling with it. How does a government organization saddled with
the bureaucracy that even the most forward thinking government organizations
come with. Is there an overall strategic response to this problem?
Is crisis?
Speaker 2 (13:42):
So I think the obvious answer is that new ideas
in the intelligence business that are really powerful, that allow
you to collect secrets that you didn't have before, that
open new areas for collection and analysis become irresistible. These
secrets are so powerful once you learn to read somebody's mail,
(14:06):
listening to their phone calls, it's resistible. Because policymakers, once
they've got that conversation between the General secretary and his
chief of staff, they want it. They want to get
the good stuff. So there's always a demand for policy
makers for the very best intelligence. And if technology can
allow people to get more of that or sustain the
(14:29):
flow of it, certainly the demand will be there. I
just wouldn't note if you look at what the CIA
and other agencies were able to know about Russian intentions
in late twenty twenty one, when Europe and even Ukraine
said no, the Russians aren't going to attack, and Bill
(14:51):
Burns and his colleagues kept going out and saying, yes
they are, and that they had detailed intelligence. They were
reading Russian intentions like a phone book. It's still not
clear just how they had such precise intelligence, but they
knew right where they were coming out. How Ukraine in
the early days of the war was able to be
(15:12):
so successful. We knew where they were coming. They were
coming to the airport just west of Kiev. We knew
exactly what they were going to try to do and
ban there were people there waiting for them, and they
just took them out. But the electronic coordination of all
the systems that have to have to operate simultaneously we
don't think about. You know, if you've got an hour
of time and you've got all these different multiple fires,
(15:35):
different drones, different systems that cannot be done by human beings,
too complicated. So there's a way in which the war
in Ukraine was an algorithm and the complex systems for
handling data that's never been done in the warfare before.
That is something of that complexity managed electronically simultaneously. You've
never seen that before.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
So the diagnosis is actually rumors of the demise maybe
over exaggerating. What you're really looking at in the piece
is more continued relevance in a five to ten year horizon.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
So I'm looking at the people who were trying to
change the paradigm. But the point that should encourage people,
if you're an American, you have to say that is
there are a lot of really smart people out there.
Many of them got frustrated being the CI. It's pretty
bureaucratic these days, got a little political, to put a
mild late so people say. And they're out there trying
(16:31):
to create companies that are going to be good for
their former colleagues, solve problems that they couldn't solve while
they were in an operation, and so people are coming
up with, as I say, quite innovative ideas.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Talk a bit about Aaron Brown's story, if you don't mind,
how you first met him, how his insights within the
agency were rejected, and how he came to design Lumbra
and even engage with Samiltman in the very early days
of chat Chipet's release.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Brown was an Army ranger and if you don't know
anything about what they do at ranger school, you know
these are the guys who can climb up a cliff
face and run ten miles or a fifty pound pack
on their back and get in and out of incredible places.
They're tough fighters and end up going to these special units,
(17:21):
And like many very good soldiers, Aaron ended up getting
cut to the CI and worked in its counter terrorism
operations in the days of the pursuit of wassamb B
and Laud. All the while he was with a deep
engineer's interest in electronics, was trying to think about the
tools of his craft and whether they were adequate. And
(17:42):
when the bin laden work was done, he began to
worry about the vulnerability of officers overseas to this technology
that could recognize the way they walked. And just think
about it. If you've got recordings of everybody enters all
the airports of China, everybody who enters the US embassy,
or all the consulates that we have, you could end
(18:04):
up having a library that you can then run against
people all over China. You see, well, where that guy
from the US embassy, what's he doing in chung Du?
Why do you go to that forest that's ten miles
out of town. What's going on here? So he left
the agency year eighteen months ago and with a friend
started this company, Lumbra, And his basic idea is that
(18:29):
it's not simply these magnificent ais that are moving towards
what we call superintelligence without being quite sure what that means.
But computers that begin to be able to think in
real human like ways and begin to give themselves instructions,
maybe by writing their own programs, begin to be able
(18:49):
to speak to each other. It's one thing super intelligence
will be able to do. And his insight was that
just as our brilliant brains need hands, legs, the ability
to get to what we need to assemble to then process,
computers are going to need agents agentic AI that will
help them assemble that disparate pieces of information, think and
(19:13):
then analyze and make sense of it. No human being could.
So he decided that that was his going to be
his area, this central nervous system that's going to connect
the AI brain with all the other parts of the
system that will make it most effective. He in turn
introduced me to other friends, a guy who was thinking
(19:35):
about this problem of how our cell phones give off
our identity, but we still have to communicate, So how
our officers going to communicate without giving away their position.
And it turns out he came up with an incredibly
ingenious technology that essentially the three or four levels of
identifiers in our phones were not aware of that give
off our identification, but kind a way to bounce those
(19:57):
identifiers among the different a thousands of users of his system,
so you can't really tell where any particular signal is
coming from, even if you capture it. It's called Cape.
Third company that interesting to me was called Strider. It's
based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Essentially, what they're doing
(20:18):
is reading other people's digital dust. We're not the only
ones who leave digital dust. The Chinese are so intent
on monitoring their own population. They've got cameras on every
street and it's not to watch us, is to watch
Chinese people. And it turns out that that's an entry
way for companies like Strider to collect an amazing amount
(20:39):
of information. I mean, I've looked at it what they
can get, and it's it's pretty incredible. Imagine how long
it would take you to do that kind of forensics
in a free digital world. So that's something that that
company is doing. They think they probably do it better
than any internal agency in the government. The fact that
(21:00):
they were willing to talk about it with me in detail,
I didn't sneak them in the telling me, it means
that they're fairly confident they can continue to do it.
So those are three little examples of companies that are
playing around at the frontier, and I hope people will
find that encouraging. I would hate to think that we
were just a slumbering, sloppy giant with the intelligence equivalent
(21:23):
of aircraft carriers just sitting there away and get blown
out of the water. I don't want that.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
We've talked a lot about concerns about the CIA falling
behind technologically. Do you have any concerns about a swing
too hot in the other direction and onboarding too many
untested private technologies that could create risk either to American
citizens or systems risk. I mean, what's the kind of
flip side concern and everything we've been talking about.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So, you know, this is a period where we're seeing
that the powers of government can be misused in what
to me are quite disturbing. When is you know, when
law enforcement is federalized, you see overreach, and you could
see a technological version of that overreach. You could see
(22:09):
the application of facial recognition software. In China, a citizens
can't go out of his town without permission. He gets
a score based on his performance at work, rating his
social merit. He gets a little gold star if he's
a dutiful citizens supporting the Chinese Communist Party. We don't
(22:31):
want that, and we don't want our schools, I don't
think to become rigid in what they instruct We want creativity,
not uniformity, and these tools can create uniformity sadly. So
you know, we have to remember that the power of
our federal government is overwhelming and that we want it
(22:53):
to be strong in dealing with our adversaries. But if
that power begins to be used against American citizens or
inappropriate ways around the world, everybody should be watching. So
that's I think my biggest challenge is a journalist. I
think this revolution is needed and beneficial, but I think
the dangers are ones that we have to keep in mind.
(23:16):
It can't be so worried about the danger you just
to stop and say we're not going to do it.
That would be a mistake. But you do have to
be eventualan all the time about what could happen.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Well, David Nations, thank you so much for joining us
on text us today for a fascinating conversation, and I
hope you'll join us again before too long.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
With pleasure Us. Thank you very much for.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Text Stuff. I amost Forelosian and I'm care Price. This
episode was Preduce Spy, Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill.
It was executive produced by Me, Karen Price, and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack
Insley makes this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Join us on Friday for the week in tech as
and I will run through the tech headlines you may
have missed. Please rate, review, and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
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