Alexandra Lieben 0:01
Welcome, everybody. I'm taking my mask off. It's my privilege. Thank you all for being here. This is our first in person event in two years. So it's a really momentous occasion actually. And I couldn't think of a better person to launch us back into this post COVID era then. Today, you're really privileged because you will get a wonderful talk of wonderful introduction, overview of intelligence agencies and work here in the United States. And what we have to look forward to and should think about, but first, let me introduce me now. First, let me tell you who I am standing up here. I'm Alexandra Lieben. I'm the Deputy Director of the Brooklyn center for international relations. And it's my pleasure to introduce Amy, who is a professor at Stanford in the political science department. She's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was the former director, co director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She's a contributing editor, that could be my phone amplified. And so on that note, can everybody please turn off your phones.
She's a contributing editor to the Atlantic or at the Atlantic. And I really encourage you to read her articles, but her writings have also appeared in The New York Times in the Wall Street Journal, and in foreign affairs. In addition to that, she's a national security analyst who has been called to speak and shed light on puzzling questions at CNN, MSNBC, Fox Television, and national health video. We met when he was on the faculty here at the School of Public Affairs before it was the Luskin School of Public Affairs and sweats my really great pleasure and happiness that you're back to Alexandria. So the format, what we're going to do today is like Amy is going to give her remarks like speak about the book for about 20 minutes, then we have a brief conversation, then we open it up to q&a with all of you. Thank you.
Amy Zegart 2:05
It's so good to be back at UCLA. And so Alexandra was one of my graduate students. We're not going to say when it's such an honor to be with my cherished former colleagues, Mark Peterson, Al Carnesale for those of you don't know, Chancellor Emeritus Carnesale always asked the really tough questions. And he's he promised me though, that he wouldn't Heckle. But it is a special treat to be back here.
I was a professor here for 12 years. And this book started here. It started with a class that I taught on US intelligence in the midst of a lot of intelligence controversies Iraq War, WMD, failure, detention, interrogation programs, warrantless surveillance. And I started pulling my students about what they understood about intelligence where they got their information about US intelligence agencies from and the answer was spy themed entertainment. And so this got me on a long journey to write a book to try to be what I call intelligence 101. So separating fact from fiction about all things related to the history of us espionage, how it's worked. But then it took me so long to write the book that the world changed. And so it really is also I hope, and intelligence 2.0 version, which is how emerging technologies and we'll talk a lot more about that are transforming every aspect of intelligence. And we can see this playing out in real time in Ukraine right now. So I'm sure we'll touch on that in our conversation and then q&a.
So So let me jump in. And especially since we have my nuclear expert friend and colleague, Al Carnesale here, I'm going to focus on nuclear threats at the end and the wild world of open source intelligence tracking nuclear dangers. But I want to start with a moment in time that happened as I was finishing the book. So this is over July 4, weekend 2020. There is a fire that breaks out in Tehran, and the flames of that fire are so bright, they're detected by a weather satellite from space. Now, Iran, Atomic Energy Organization initially downplays the fire and they release the photo that you see in the slide behind me. And you can see from that photograph, it looks like a pretty boring building with a little bit of damage. And the Atomic Energy Organization called that building an industrial shed that was under construction, and said that the fire was a an incident that had pretty limited damage. Well, two people quickly got to work. Their names are David Albright and Fabian heights. Neither one of them worked for a US government agency, not an intelligence agency, neither one of them held a security clearance. They only use publicly available information or open source intelligence. They work at different nonprofits. They each geo locate the building and they quickly conclude that Tehran is lying. This is Not an industrial shed under construction. It's a nuclear centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz, one of Iran's most important facilities for its nuclear program.
They also discover using commercial satellite imagery that the fire is not small that the damage is in fact, extensive. The fire was likely caused by an explosion and might well be the result of sabotage. They go on Twitter. So the flames of the fire were detected two in the morning by eight in the morning, they're on Twitter. The Associated Press runs that are analysis by afternoon, the New York Times has a major story, running their analysis about how Tehran is line, and this might be an act of sabotage. By evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is asked about their analysis in a press conference and whether Israel was responsible for sabotaging Iran illicit nuclear weapons program. And Netanyahu replied, in characteristic fashion, I don't address these issues. This is a great example of the new world of intelligence. All of these events transpired in the course of a single business day. All of them involved publicly available information, not classified intelligence, and all of them took place with key players outside of the US government. So we know this is a dramatically new world, that spine isn't just for governments anymore.
Now anybody can collect intelligence, produce intelligence, analyze intelligence disseminate intelligence. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the last time in 2014, the best intelligence about troop movements came from selfies, not secrets, Russian soldiers like to post photographs of themselves on social media. And they did it with Ukrainian highway signs in the background and timestamps on those photographs. So what I find in this book is that a convergence of emerging technologies, think the internet, social media, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, synthetic biology, and more, we have this convergence of emerging technologies that are radically transforming the intelligence business. And it's what I argue in the book, a moment of reckoning for our intelligence agencies in the United States, as important and serious as the moment of reckoning right after 911. Now, but before I dive into the new world, I want to just spend a minute on the old world of intelligence and level set about what what intelligence is and why it's so hard.
So this like, gives you just a sense of intelligence, they say is the second oldest profession. The oldest surviving intelligence reports were chiseled on those clay tablets 3000 years ago. We know that in China, the art of war, that famous book was written 2000 years before the American Revolution. And Benjamin Franklin was the master of deception in his day, you think the Russians invented modern information warfare looking at American history, because Franklin cranked out literally fake news from his parents basement during the war, to change public opinion in Europe. So we know intelligence has been around forever. But the data that I collect in the book, starting with polls of my UCLA undergraduates in my class, did national surveys found that most Americans don't know anything about how intelligence agencies actually operate.
I'll just give you a couple of data points. In Congress, there are more powdered milk experts than intelligence experts today, more members of the Congressional dairy caucus than people in the Congress who have served in an intelligence agency before and actually know what the acronym stands for. But professors don't study intelligence either. I looked at my own field political science, 15 years of journal articles over from after 911. And I counted them up and I looked at what they covered. And I found a total of nearly 3000 articles published by the top three overall journals in the discipline, and only five of those nearly 3000 articles covered anything related to the US intelligence. So when intelligence is front and center and policy, political science professors have been studying a lot of other things. And since professors teach what they know, we don't have a lot of intelligence courses in the United States, either.
This is my favorite slide. It's a leading slide. Guess which YouTube is top is taught at more top 25 universities. It is YouTube, the rock band, not YouTube. Despite way more the top 25 offer courses on the history of rock and roll than anything related to American intelligence. And so I find that there's an education gap in our country, our policymakers don't understand intelligence as well as they need to the public doesn't either. So let me move on to a very basic question, what is intelligence anyway? And it's a more complicated question than it might seem. The most simple explanation is intelligence is any kind of information that gives policymakers decision advantage. Right? They can understand threats and opportunities faster than adversaries. Sounds pretty straightforward. What intelligence is not is also important. It is not a crystal ball. That sounds cliche, but we often hold our intelligence agencies to wildly unrealistic expectations. Why didn't we know the pinpoint time of the fall of the government in Afghanistan? Why didn't we know more about what Russia would do with Ukraine?
So intelligence is not a crystal ball. There are many reasons that make intelligence hard. And I listed them on the slide fragments of information, lots of ambiguity, even imagery that looks like it's a smoking gun is almost never a smoking gun. Because even if you know, Russia's troops around the border of Ukraine, you don't know what Vladimir Putin's intentions are, until he moves them. Intelligence is not policy, intelligence officials are never supposed to walk into the White House and say, Mr. President, this is what the intelligence says, and therefore you should do A, B or C. And intelligence is not just secrets never has been most information and an intelligence report, roughly 80% On average, even during the Cold War, came from publicly available information.
So if that's the case, and most intelligence isn't secrets, why do we spend more than $80 billion a year on 18 agencies called the US intelligence community? Or as I put it, with a little more snark in the title, what makes our intelligence community more valuable than Google and just doing a Google search? And there are really three answers that you'll often hear about the unique mission or value added of intelligence agencies.
The first is the tailoring information a policymaker needs, policymakers need intelligence, on particular questions in particular timeframes, right? Will that bridge up ahead support my take? What is Putin going to do in Ukraine? And then even longer term issues as well? What's the purpose of China's nuclear missile increase? largest increase in China's history? What are they doing with those weapons? What's the cyber landscape look like? Tailoring information.
The second value added is what intelligence folks like to call speaking truth to power. And that is giving policymakers intelligence about questions that they might not have thought to ask. And they might not want to hear. Right. So this is the spinach function of intelligence. It's good for you, even if you don't want to eat it, right. That's what intelligence agencies are supposed to do. That's hard to do in practice.
And then the third unique function is synthesizing all of that open source information in the world with the intercepted phone call abroad with the secrets stolen from a prime minister safe. So putting those things together. Why is intelligence so hard? So Don Rumsfeld got a lot of flack when he actually said this at a press conference related to the Iraq War. And I'm just going to read it aloud because you can tell how confusing it is when you hear it, this is what he this is verbatim what he said. As we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know. We don't know. People had a field day they put Rumsfeld poetry to music. They thought he lost his mind. They thought this was a gap. But in fact, Rumsfeld was channeling something, the founding father of the CIA's analytic branch Sherman Ken wrote about in the 1960s. And it's a reason why helps us to understand why intelligence is so difficult.
Three types of information in the world that intelligence agencies have to contend with. The first of these, the known knowns are indisputable facts. These are questions that have answers, and intelligence agencies happen to know what those answers are. So does China have an aircraft carrier? It's a knowable thing. And US intelligence agencies know the answer. The answer is yes, China has two aircraft carriers, the second class of information, things that are knowable questions that have answers, but US intelligence agencies don't know those answers yet. So the example here is, how would China's aircraft carriers operate at sea under various conditions over a long period of time? That's a knowable thing. But US intelligence agencies may not know it unless they have someone on board those carriers and have access to data over a long period of time. So it's a knowable thing but may be unknown to us. Then there's the third category, which is the toughest one for intelligence, the unknown unknowns. These are questions that no one has answers to. So I put on the slide, how long will China's Communist Party stay in power? If you ask Xi Jinping that question, he would not know the answer to it. Right? These are unknown unknowns. And this is gets to adversary intentions, very complicated long term questions. And that's where the rubber meets the road, often in intelligence.
Okay, so that's the old world. And it's hard enough in the old world, how is new technology driving new challenges and intelligence. And I basically consolidate the challenges to intelligence and what I call the five Moore's and I'm going to go through each one of these more threats, more speed, more data, more customers, people who need intelligence, and more competitors. And I'll just go through these a little bit quickly. This is the picture worth 1000 words. If you ask folks during the Cold War, what was the biggest threat to the United States, they would say the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, that black and white picture is a reference photograph of a Soviet missile being paraded helpfully for US intelligence through Red Square.
Today, thanks to emerging technology, the threat landscape is far more complex and crowded. And if we think about cyberspace, empowering new adversaries, and old adversaries in new ways, I think we get a sense of how complicated that threat landscape has become. For all of history, until now, two things above all protected the United States from foreign threats, power, and geography, more powerful military is, the better protected the country was, and our geography or vast oceans protected us from bad neighborhoods. in cyberspace, those things don't protect. We are the most powerful or one of the most powerful countries in cyberspace. And we're also one of the most vulnerable countries in cyberspace. Because we're so digitally connected. And our military power does not protect us in cyberspace in our geography doesn't because we're all in bad neighborhoods in cyberspace. So technology plays a really important role with the threat landscape. But the speed of intelligence has to be accelerating now to intelligence has to move at the speed of relevance for policy. And you can see how fast the policy cycle is now moving. And you know, they don't give you a PhD in Political Science unless you say something about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So here's my Cuban Missile Crisis reference. So Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 13 days, right. That's the amount of time we had from the time that the intelligence the smoking gun proof of Soviet nuclear missile installations, that intelligence reached the White House and President Kennedy deliberated on it and decided on course of action, he had 13 days 911, President Bush had 13 hours from the first terrorist attacks, to understanding what the intelligence suggested about who was responsible, and delivering a policy address to the nation about what policy would be now in cyberspace, that speed of relevance for for intelligence, maybe 13 minutes, or 13 seconds, or maybe it's come on in and have a seat. You're just at the exciting part with with technology. Or maybe we're too late and intelligence because we know cyber attacks are often discovered months after the breach initially happens. So the bad guys have been in the house for a long time before you know, they're there. So that speed of intelligence competing with Twitter and other sources of information is accelerating. That's a big challenge. The third more more data. We are all drowning in data. I'll just give you one example to give you a sense of the magnitude of the challenge for an intelligence analyst today. The World Economic Forum found in 2019 that internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent nearly 300 billion emails and posted 350 million photographs on Facebook every day. Right? So intelligence is finding needles in haystacks to try to generate insight. And now those haystacks are growing exponentially. Analysts are being overwhelmed by data.
The fourth more more people who don't have security clearances who need intelligence today. The picture you have behind me is a public service announcement for voters about foreign interference in elections. We're seeing much more public service announcement type activity from traditionally very secret agencies. voters need intelligence now, tech leaders need intelligence Now about cyber threats, critical infrastructure, executives like financial services people, power and water executives need intelligence about how to keep their own organization safe. And so intelligence has to produce for the open, not just the classified world, and they're working on them. That's a big change for the secret agencies of the intelligence community. And then there are the competitors. And I, I use the example of the Star Wars cantina.
Unfortunately, my friends and colleagues who work in this open source nuclear threat world say they like the image of the Star Wars cantina that describes them. So I have a chapter in the book, and I spent two years looking at the emerging open source intelligence world with respect to nuclear threats, who's in this world? How do they operate? And how do we think about the risks and the benefits of this emerging landscape? And so I'll give you just an idea of how wide ranging this universe is. These are two guys who are very into nonproliferation. They're very active in the open source nuclear threat business. The one that is wearing the cardinal red shirt is my Stanford colleague, Sieg Hecker. Sieg is a nuclear physicist. He is Director Emeritus of Los Alamos National Lab, he used to work only with high level security clearances. And now he does not want a clearance and he produced his intelligence analysis was principally on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, based on unclassified sources. And he's produced very influential work about North Korea's missile testing program, and its fissile material programs all in the open source world.
The other guy in the slide is a rare coin dealer who lives in Tennessee, named Jacob Vogel's. And he has a passion for mapping North Korea, and he has some of the best maps of North Korea and the military implications of those maps. Both of these guys are in this open source world. What does that mean? If you take a step back and ask, what are the systematic differences between the traditional intelligence bureaucracy and the US intelligence community, and this emerging ecosystem of organizations and individuals working only in the unclassified space on nuclear threat detection? How do they differ? Well, in the open source world, people have a wide range of motives and backgrounds. Some of them are hobbyists, some of them are seeking profit. Some of them just want to do a good job.
Their backgrounds are incredibly diverse, right from Sieg Hecker to Jacob Vogle, they anyone can join, if you have an internet connection. Quality control is voluntary. It's informal errors can get out and no one really loses a job over it. And the whole ecosystem moves very fast. Right think about the picture at the beginning of my talk with David Albright, and Fabian Heinz how fast that compare that to US intelligence agencies, the motors are much more narrowly tailored, right? It's decision advantage, everyone working in the intelligence community signs on to that mission. their backgrounds are more narrow, and it's hard to join. You can't just join an intelligence agency, it takes two years now, hopefully less director burns and the CIA is trying to reduce that time. But you have to get a security clearance is hard to get in. Bureaucracy means there are systematic processes for quality control doesn't mean they're always right. But there are standards, right. And there are there's peer review. And there's a process by which information is vetted. And of course, the whole thing moves more slowly, right at the speed of bureaucracy.
So there are some key benefits to this emerging ecosystem. There are more people who can put their minds to what's going on in the world. Again, we're seeing this in Ukraine, this open source reporting what's going on on the ground, using commercial satellite imagery to track what's going on. They can share that information because it's unclassified. That's a big deal. They can share it within the US government, between different agencies and across the US and other countries. And they bring different perspectives to bear on the same issues. And this is an ode to my engineering friends. You know, the the old joke that the optimist sees the glass is half full, and the pessimist sees the glass is half empty. But for engineers, the glass is twice as large as it needs to be diverse perspectives make for better analysis. But there risks risks.
Number one errors get out the door before the truth has a chance to make its case and errors can go viral, and that can be very distracting for policymakers and intelligence officials. This has already happened. I can talk more about that. It's wide open for deliberate deception in this open source world. Again, we see this playing out in Russia and Ukraine. Anybody can post anything and inject deception into this world, including the nuclear threat world. And crises could be harder to manage, with everything being transparent. So imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis playing out today on Twitter, where there's commercial satellite imagery, and a third party says we've detected Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba. We know the real Cuban missile crisis had two key ingredients to success. Time to think for John F. Kennedy and his team and secrecy to compromise with the Russians. The end of the crisis was a deal so secret, no one knew about it for two decades a missile swap, Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba, the US withdrew missiles from Turkey, nuclear missiles from Turkey. But what we see in the open source role is not time to think and secrecy to compromise.
We see speed and transparency that can force political leaders to take action before they're ready, and reduces room for them to maneuver quietly behind the scenes. So crisis management could get harder. Let me just end with some implications for both theory or academic research and for policy. So I think for international relations Scholars, this is a very exciting time. There's a new generation of scholarship that is looking at the strategic use of openness and secrecy, and how we understand its use historically, among allies as well as adversaries. And I listed on the slide a couple of words that I think if you haven't read you should Austin Carson's great book on covert action. And Melinda Haas and Keren Yarhi-Milo work more recently about allied use of secrecy and lying or deception. So there's a really, it's a really exciting time to be looking at secrecy and International Relations.
For policy, I think the implications are, we need a radical change in our intelligence community, secret agencies will always favorite secrets. And if you think the name of the game for insight in this emerging technology world is open source intelligence and how to deal with an abundance of data, not just the scarcity of secrets, we have to have a dedicated agency outside of the secret agencies that's focused on this explicit admission, we can talk more about what the downside risks to that proposal are, and what why I think it's so important that we think about creating yet another intelligence agency. I'm going to stop there and join Alexandra for her questions and conversation.
Alexandra Lieben 28:02
I was debating which question to ask you first. But I want to tee up my second question, actually, with how President Biden used intelligence in the lead up to the war. It was really fascinating because we were following classified intelligence by being publicized granularly, and minute by minute, and we've never seen this before. So there's a risk in that, right. There's a benefit and a risk for that. And I was, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Amy Zegart 28:33
So so, you know, for me, I was fixated and fascinated by the Biden's administration's use of intelligence. And you're right, that that we never seen anything close to the frequency, the granularity, the persistence of this release of fairy classified intelligence. And I think there's, I don't know this to be the case. I've been asking folks in the administration there, be mom about it. But my speculation is I think there are three reasons that the administration did it. I think it's a very smart move.
The first is inoculation. And I wrote about this in the Atlantic if you want to read this sort of fuller version, inoculation. So Putin has been very good at getting deception out into the world before the truth has a chance to catch up. But this was the Biden administration saying the Kremlin is about to pull a con on you don't believe anything you're going to hear. And so I think the information narrative benefits for information warfare were really important, I think, to rallying the allies and making people be more aware, you might remember zolecki actually was complaining about the intelligence suggesting that an invasion was imminent because his economy was tanking and suggested that we were panicking. It turns out the intelligence was accurate. So I think inoculation was reason number one.
Reason number two, is it imposed friction on Putin. So this is a page out of the Cyber Command playbook. If if you're adversary has to spend more time on its own defense. It can't spend as much time on offense. And so Putin's an intelligence guy. I'm sure he was spending a lot of time wondering how do they know this? Who is Who can I trust and who can't I trust and worried about fixing his own intelligence problems. And you can hear it with CIA director Bill Burns, talking about how unsettled Putin is how we sort of knocked off his timing. You know, I think there's some sense in the administration that it was helpful that release of classified information and giving giving Putin more of a distraction, and setting him off his front foot.
And then the third, I think, is the most interesting part, which is I call it the removal of the fig leaf. It's really hard for countries to sit on the sidelines, when you say the fig leaf narrative that Putin is putting out there. Is doesn't hold water. And I call it it's the logic of covert action in reverse and covert action countries often pretend that they're not responsible for something, mostly, it will, in large part to get third party countries to help them on the slide. The fig leaf is useful. So the example I give is Afghanistan. The covert option action we did in Afghanistan, Soviets knew what we were doing are in the Mujahideen, and we knew that the Soviets knew so why do we pretend? And the answer is the Egyptians and the Pakistanis were able to help us under the fig leaf. Well, now we're removing the fig leaf. And so I think it's one of the reasons why you see the Swiss of all people the Swiss signing on to sanctions, I think it's why you see China of staining the UN Security Council, right, it's hard to stand on the sidelines, or help on the sly when the fig leaf is gone. So I think it's one of the reasons why we see those countries that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be so what you know, you would have thought they would do something different than they have. I think China in particular, it's a much more muted response than we might have expected, I think the strategy has helped.
Alexandra Lieben 31:59
For like, we learned, right, Putin has been a master in this actually, then leads me like to my next question, and that's, that's also the different nature of this for my intellect, for the first time, we have a cyber and social media, which for which is really interesting, and here too, it is about getting ahead of, of in the information warfare, like men, who is who is putting the truth out, so to speak, through images, people post videos, messages, like using all social media platforms. And then also, Zielinski, like who is a master how he used it right to like, shape his own image, get the world to buy in, like on his side, that the support and the collaboration. So your thoughts on this is like, it's really fascinating to watch, and also hard for Putin to come behind and say all this, like, I mean, that's why he's cutting off what he's doing in his own country, but to
Amy Zegart 32:53
Hm yeah, you know, political scientist is, you know, we love to look for generalizable explanations for everything. And Zelinsky is showing us how much individuals matter. He's incredibly skilled at using the information environment, to plead his case directly with publics in the in the US and in Europe. And so, but I don't think that's the only thing that he's doing. You know, I think the Ukrainians are very adept at using the information environment. So these have you seen these phone calls have captured Russian soldiers, calling their mothers, right? This is a very clever strategy to foment domestic opposition in Russia to the war with the mothers of the troops that are in Ukraine. So this information war, I think, you know, many experts, myself included, were wrong about how this war was going to play out in cyberspace. The conventional wisdom is cyber is going to be a big part of how Putin goes in. We know he has, you know, he used Ukraine as a testbed turning out the power in 2015 2016. He didn't do that. But what we are seeing is information being used or the cyber means being used in a really different way. And it's not hacking machines, it's hacking people's minds changing how they think.
Alexandra Lieben 34:05
Why is he not using it? And in today's attacks on on utility, plenty multiple, right, tactical attacks, so he could have turned it off in theory.
Amy Zegart 34:14
So I have asked this question of policymakers too, and as far as I don't know, for sure. So there are only two logical explanations. One he hasn't tried, or two, he has tried and he's been blocked. And then the testimony yesterday in the House Intelligence Committee by General Nakasone, had a Cyber Command. He did give some elliptical reference to the fact that there are other countries that may have made it difficult for Putin to engage his cyber capabilities. So take a look at what he said about that. So I suspect it may be a little bit of both, but I thought it was going to be easy. He didn't need to reveal those capabilities. Because once you use it, you can lose it because people know what you have and what you can do. And so he didn't want to use it because he thought he didn't need to. He thought this was going to be a march right through the country and will be fast. We know that he miscalculated, but I think the US and other countries may have done something too.
Alexandra Lieben 35:05
But it's really a select on the citizen front, right? We have black hat and white hat hackers descending on Ukraine, virtually, as like everybody's like trying to fortify their side like and, and how that is going to play out to because there's like they're recruiting each other. And I'm wondering, like, what, that's unregulated, right? That's open source. Basically, that's like, there's no government centralized command on this, how that is going to play out.
Amy Zegart 35:31
I do think, you know, there is some risk of miscalculation involved in this sort of everyone jumping and doing what they can in Ukraine. So if you think about if private sector actors are creating websites and doing things to help the Ukrainian people, Visa V, Russia, from the standpoint of Vladimir Putin, he sees no distinction between the US government and US companies. Right. So this could be misperceived as an officially us action, when in fact, it isn't. So I think we need to be a little bit more careful about it's, you know, it's, it is in general, a really good thing. And you can see a lot of private sector pressure being brought to bear on Russia. But we don't want to run the risk of we're imaging thinking that the Russians see it as we see it. And I think from Putin's perspective, it could be seen as more tied to official government policy than anything.
Alexandra Lieben 36:20
My last question before we open up some covert action actually like because as we look at like the convoy, right, moving toward Kiev, is like, where are the drones when we need them? So it's like what's happening? What do you think?
Amy Zegart 36:33
You know, I think there's really this is a fog of war moment. I am this is going to fill doctoral dissertations for years to come what actually happened in Ukraine? You know, what's interesting to me is how much is being done overtly. So why do we have covert action? Well, one of the reasons I already talked about the third party, you know, sort of helping out, but the other is to keep from escalating. So when you say things aren't an official act of war, you're pretending you're not officially involved, it keeps the conflict from going up the escalation ladder, and we're really worried about the nuclear top of the escalation ladder, right, Putin has issued the first public nuclear alert, raising his nuclear alert since the 60s, this is a big deal. So so I'm surprised that we haven't done more, under more of a covert even a fig leaf covert action, it's been pretty overt. And you've seen the sort of red line so far with the with the fighter jets in Poland, a lot of human cry about that real concern about escalation. We don't know where the line is for Putin. And so you're seeing policymakers try to figure that out. I suspect there's a lot of covert action going on, and probably was beforehand, but we don't know yet. We'll have to wait for tweaking classified. Questions.
Speaker 3 37:50
I read a question, it goes back to earlier on in your presentation, suddenly, it always struck me as difficult for intelligence community as well as others. And it has to do while you use Rumsfeld and the nine numbers, there's also a Mark Twain quote, it's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's the things you know for sure that you're staying self. And history. So let me give a couple of examples of the problem. It was, quote, known that they were nuclear weapons in Iraq. How would you prove that's not true? If those who claimed the time they're around do well, now, there are secret facilities that we don't know about, including nuclear weapons? How can you prove that's not true? So it's the the fact that having to prove the negative is virtually impossible. I assume tilts intelligence communities and others to try to bring their results and ways where they can't be proven wrong? You find that to be the case?
Amy Zegart 39:06
Yes. And so I mean, you've seen intelligence products, which often say things like, we cannot rule out the possibility that or we think with moderate confidence that and, you know, you can see that the challenge on both sides. So intelligence agencies are really worried about being proven wrong being charged with failure. And so they want to, they want to have a nuanced sort of probability estimate. But policymakers also misunderstand the problem. probability estimate, Phil Tetlock who does great work at Penn causes the wrong side of maybe fallacy. So if weather forecasters say is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow and it doesn't rain, you think what a bad forecast that was? Well, they didn't say there was a 0% chance of rain. They said 303 times out of 10. It is going to rain tomorrow. And so intelligence agencies are really concerned about the wrong side of me. fallacy, which is why I think they've resisted giving numeric probability estimates for so long. Because if you're not, because they're worried about getting caught being wrong, I think there's another challenge here, which is even when intelligence is successful, it can look like a failure. So imagine that Putin had decided not to invade Ukraine. And our intelligence which we were pouring out there was saying he's going to invade, he's going to invade, go innovate, what the release of that intelligence actually leads to the leads to a different decision. Everyone would say, well, there you go, again, it's Iraq, WMD, all over again. And the intelligence agencies failed, when in fact, they had succeeded. So it's hard to tell the difference between failure and success. Next question. Come on.
Speaker 4 40:53
Thank you for halfway through, that seemed very interesting. My question was in relation to one of your earlier answers that we need to call it and how that's being reused. There's a publication that I read, I can show months ago in the Atlantic called bye, guys are winning, which is essentially, which makes the case that there's a growing divide in international relations in the sense that credit countries are increasingly fighting with each other, almost a sense that a block is being formed there. And one element has been pardoned by that is that essentially, a lot of these autocratic countries, they're often ruled by a small elite who care, particularly about their political power and their wealth, and not so much about the well being of their own citizens. And because of this, they don't really count that much. If you know, Western nations organizations do the concern of they might get sanctions against them, because it doesn't affect them all that much. And, in general, and isolation going forward. And also, in the case of this Ukraine crisis, I was wondering whether you think that's going to be increasingly the case, in the sense that, you know, you mentioned that China abstained in the vote in the UN. But if other countries like, for instance, Hungary, or Pakistan, or Brazil, or any country that might have a leader that, you know, we tend to view as an autocratic one, is going to increasingly if they're gonna sort of create a small circle where they say to themselves and sort of seek help, seek to come to each other's aid, financially and politically. Or if you know, the values that we seek international relations will. I'm moving my words, but we'll come through.
Amy Zegart 42:48
Well, I think this is a moment of uncertainty with respect to the autocrats feel like they're winning. There are inherent weaknesses in these autocratic regimes. So it feels like there's a juggernaut that China, Russia access feels like a juggernaut. They're exporting surveillance technology to the Chinese to 3030 plus countries in the world. And it feels like they can act with this sort of speed and decisiveness that democracies can't, because we're messy, and we argue a lot. There are inherent weaknesses to this approach, right. And Condi Rice likes to say that, you know, autocratic regimes can make good policies quickly and bad policies quickly. So you think about China's one child policy, 30 million people now who don't have a kid don't have someone to marry right, in the end, the massive demographic upheaval in China because of this one child policy. So they're not, you know, there are weaknesses there.
But I think this moment with Russia and Ukraine is a critical one, because I think it's an opportunity to exploit the wedge between China and Russia. So one of the most consequential geopolitical trends over the past decade or so, is this alignment between Russia and China, not just on values, but in interests. And it's, you know, at least the intelligence community has assessed the greatest alignment, really, since the 1950s. But now, they're not so aligned. China's much more integrated in the global economy than the Russians are. They share similar values, but they have different interests. China really wants to be the dominant regional power, they care about reunifying with Taiwan, potentially by force. And so Russia is making it hard. And it's making it hard for China to keep European and American markets, while also not criticizing Vladimir Putin. So we put China in a tough spot, and that's a good thing.
So I think this is an opportunity to pursue that wedge, can we divide our adversaries in a way that is useful? And can we regain our footing with respect to promoting our values as a source of global power? So maybe democracies aren't so on the decline as we think they are? I mean, you see this resurgent European Alliance, whoever thought that Germany Germany would volunteer now to make good on its NATO defense commitments and sort of pay more attention to its defense, who would have thought that countries that weren't interested in NATO until now, with suddenly Express so much interest in joining. So I think this is an aha moment for democracies around the world that maybe the Nord Stream two pipeline with the Russians in Germany was a bad idea. So I'm hopeful that the autocrats are not going to win. And this is a key moment in history, when we look back, that we could exploit the gap between Russia and China.
Alexandra Lieben 45:37
It says a good for sustainable energy in Europe, because it's like enough of that dependence. Yeah. Next question. So please keep it short.
Speaker 5 45:46
So I am a little late. So I'll talk about this a little bit. But as you're saying earlier, the ministers was right out there very, very intelligent that he was going to try and cram this correct. But there's just been so much misinformation out there around the first few days before I believe. And I believe in all these propaganda on both sides, I would take things as the worst. Oh, maybe money, things aren't true. But there's still so much propaganda coming to different sides in Ukraine, Ukraine more and in the past several years in America. So how do we reconcile the idea that people are not going to believe what they see anymore? Versus what I've already removed from the government or from other sources? Versus like how they tell us communities? Can you actually be helpful?
Amy Zegart 46:45
Yeah, it's a really important challenge. And so I think there's real concern about that, because of the abundance problem and the sort of information warfare problem that you just described so well. So what I have been proposing is that the intelligence community needs to think about open source intelligence, not as stuff not as information but as an ecosystem, with its own dynamics that can be shaped. And so how can we think about a model where we don't rely on intelligence agencies to verify but we train the producers of information to do their own verification. So belling cat is a great example. It's an amazing organization. They've uncovered a lot of global injustice and wrongdoing, including by the Russians that's most famous for the shoot down of Malaysian Airlines flight 17. over Ukraine, they were the ones that found the Russians responsible with incredible investigation, mostly volunteers around the world. Bellingcat has really good quality control, how do they do it? How can they export it? How can we have sort of shared norms and quality standards? Not that it's going to eliminate all this misinformation, but it would raise the general level of information that's coming out from people who are trying to get it right. So disinformation is deliberately trying to deceive misinformation as bad information people think is right, but isn't. So we can reduce the misinformation and then tapping with disinformation is another challenge altogether.
Alexandra Lieben 48:16
I have a question actually on that, and that's actually killed a compromised. There was a New York Times headline in the form about basically, the CIA losing formance. And sort of the aspect of human intelligence, right versus the data overload. We're also experiencing this like where a lot of valuable data comes out of but but here's like this question like, can your answer make me think about is that are we moving into that direction that sort of replaces traditional informants? Because twofold? Like the CIA has had a hard job and hard time hanging on to its human informants? And what that means, but like, what's the future for them?
Amy Zegart 48:57
Human intelligence is always going to be important, but it's getting a lot harder. So think about all the biometrics that we now have to deal with go into a country think about the Olympics, and go into the streets of Beijing where everything is being videoed, and your phone, you have to bring a burner phone. So how are you going to recruit a human source on the ground when everybody's being surveilled? How can you go undercover in a foreign country when your biometrics can identify? These are really tough challenges not just in China, but in other countries around the world? So what we have to have the human sources, right, so how did we know that Russia was behind? Or that the Kremlin that Putin was behind the 2016 election interference, a human source inside the Kremlin, this was publicly reported in the New York Times that source was blown, and he had to be exfiltrated from the country. So we have to figure out ways to deal with this. And it's getting a lot harder. So the CIA director earlier in the year, sent in a made news send a cable out about we have to do a much better job at our tradecraft at protecting the people we're recruiting that we want foreigners to betray their cause. For the United States, and it's getting harder and harder and harder to do that.
Alexandra Lieben 50:04
Yeah in this environment.
Speaker 6 50:08
So my question may be adjacent international relations, but you bring up this topic of like an open source community of non government affiliated after responding to threats. So, on the flip side of non government, affiliated actors who are creating the threats, what is like US policy proposals like moving towards to address those threats, and they are still a great heart potential harm to the public interest, and also, like, citizens within like, various countries are being impacted. So, but those are like much more like, unknown since they're individual parties. So what's like the potential to go to address.
Amy Zegart 50:52
So, you know, it's a really complicated ecosystem, right. And the, if you want to learn more about sort of how it's being tracked, I am such a huge fan of Kate starburns Work Kate starboard is a professor at the University of Washington. And she's a computer scientist, and she's actually tracking how this disinformation gets, you know, sort of amplified and shared online. And there are lots of actors that are either wittingly or unwittingly complicit from mainstream media people write to provocateurs online. So I would encourage you to, she'll give you a much better answer than I can about this. What I would say is, I think it can be overwhelming to think about anybody can do anything to anyone. And there are threats, and there are threats. And if I think about what the priority threats are, and we saw this in the threat hearing yesterday in Congress, and they didn't say it in these terms, but at least my vision is I'm really worried about for threats more than anything else. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Why those four, because all four of them have four things in common.
Number one, they're all very sophisticated cyber actors. So exactly the kind of threats you're talking about, whether it's hacking, or stealing, or deceiving. They have very sophisticated cyber capabilities. All four of them either have nuclear weapons or want nuclear weapons. So think about the escalation ladder, all four of them pose territorial aggression concerns in their neighborhood, we see it in Russia, China, and Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea, North Korea, South Korea, and all four of those countries seek to disrupt and remake and just launched the US led international order. There are lots of other challenges in the world, I don't want to minimize them. We have global climate change. We have we have India, Pakistan, nuclear, if challenges on that dangerous border. But the four biggest threats are where those four vectors converge, cyber capabilities, nuclear capabilities, and physical no kidding aggression in the neighborhood, and a deliberate effort to remake the international order. And I think we need to focus on those and not worry about the other actors who are going to inject things in the information ecosystem.
Speaker 7 53:09
Last question, do you believe that states that partake in surveillance auctions have an advantage to states that don't want to say intelligence?
Amy Zegart 53:20
What do you mean by surveillance?
Speaker 7 53:22
Like surveilling our citizens?
Amy Zegart 53:26
Yes and no. Right. So to China, as an example, China's spends more on its internal security than its military. So when you're that worried about your domestic population, you know, you got some problems? Are there advantages? Absolutely. One of the reasons why China is ahead of the United States on AI with facial recognition is they have had a lot of practice, and they have a lot of data. And one of the reasons why their theft of in their hacking of so many places is so concerning. Right? Think about, you know, hacking anthem and Marriot is they're putting all these datasets together for AI. So the surveillance is one part of it, for sure. It's disturbing in its own sense, because it's anti democratic, it does give them an advantage in some technologies, but not other technologies. So I think, you know, you see the facial recognition algorithms for sure, with the Chinese and then it also makes intelligence operations by foreign services much harder. Right. So I often am telling my colleagues, I'm on a task force now on cybersecurity. You know, the internet is not free and open. Don't say it's free and open. The internet is free and open for our adversaries to collect intelligence about us. But it is not free and open for us to know what's going on on the streets of Moscow or Beijing. And so it's kind of the worst of all worlds where we're giving adversaries free run of our data, but we don't have access to better understand what's going on on the ground. So they do have asymmetric advantages in that perspective.
Alexandra Lieben 54:54
I'm going to take my last question, and that tacked on to this because how do we bridge the expertise asymmetry between our oversight committees in the House and Senate. Right. And the technology companies?
Amy Zegart 55:07
Yeah.
Alexandra Lieben 55:08
Like, is it possible to bring experts in real experts?
Amy Zegart 55:12
We're gonna end on such a depressing note, Alexandra.
Alexandra Lieben 55:14
No, no.
Amy Zegart 55:16
I think there's there's progress. Right. So one of the things I actually count up the number of engineers in the US Congress, it was higher than you might think it was 32. But only three in the US Senate. Nowhere near enough. Right. So if you think technology is so important, and the senators with the Mark Zuckerberg hearings, didn't know the difference between Facebook and Twitter, didn't know the difference between texting and social media, as Ash Carter, former Secretary of Defense said, I only wish Congress were that ill informed when they were questioning me about matters of national security, as they were with Mark Zuckerberg, it's a huge challenge. I think there's a there's a hunger in Congress to be able to get up to speed quickly. So one of the things that I'm leaving at Stanford is we're doing basically exec ed, for Congress for members of Congress on tech, all things tech. So let's get some of my colleagues and engineering to get the, you know, how do you understand fill in the blank ai 5g Quantum, at least to raise the level a little bit. But I'm really concerned about the expertise problem, because Congress is not going to be able to oversee good policy without a better understanding of how that technology works.
Alexandra Lieben 56:25
To the good ending to this is really University. We have students here he is your career track, right? Get the expertise become congressional aides to help us out
Amy Zegart 56:34
And there are actually more programs to bring tech talent into Congress and staff positions to help members better understand so if you haven't looked at it, look up tech Congress if you're an engineer, it's a great program.
Alexandra Lieben 56:45
Thank you so much. Thank you, Sandra. And here's the book. It's really fantastic, Wade. It's right over there. Come and get it and get it signed. Thanks for coming.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai