A View from the CT Foxhole: Amy Zegart, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

• Author: Fishman, Brian

CTC: Next month, your book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Lntelligence will be released by Princeton University Press. What's the central thesis of your book, and what are some of its key findings and takeaways?

Zegart: The central thesis of the book changed. I originally was going to write this book a decade ago--I'm a little embarrassed to even admit that--and it was supposed to be a textbook for university undergraduate courses. It started back when I was at UCLA where I polled my students and found out, much to my surprise, that most of their information about intelligence came from spy-themed entertainment. So the original thesis of the book was just [to] provide a textbook that separates fact from fiction and that provides an introduction for a wide audience to understand intelligence. But that thesis changed dramatically with the rise of cyber threats, Edward Snowden's revelations, and other profound changes driven by technology. One of the benefits of taking so long to write the book is that the world changed, and how U.S. intelligence agencies make sense of this dizzying threat landscape in the tech age became a much more interesting topic.

The thesis of the book now is that this is a moment of reckoning for the intelligence community, that we've never before had the convergence of so many emerging technologies--whether it's internet connectivity, AI [artificial intelligence], quantum computing, synthetic biology, and that this convergence of emerging tech is transforming every aspect of intelligence. I summarize this moment of reckoning as an adapt-or-fail moment much like it was on 9/11 for the intelligence community, and the reason is emerging technologies are driving what I call the five "mores": more threats able to threaten across vast distance, through cyberspace for example; more speed, threats are moving at the speed of networks, not the speed of bureaucracy, and so that means that collection has to be faster, analysis has to be faster, decisions using intelligence have to be faster; the third more [is] more data. Analysts are drowning in data. How can we use emerging technologies to sift vast amounts of data? The amount of data on Earth is doubling about every two years.

[The fourth more is] more customers who need intelligence to advance the national interest. Intelligence isn't just for people with clearances anymore. Voters need intelligence, critical infrastructure leaders need intelligence, tech platforms need intelligence. So how do intelligence agencies produce for the open? That's a radical transformation.

And then the fifth more: more competitors. The government's ability to collect and analyze information is nowhere near dominant compared to what it used to be in the Cold War. Open source isn't just a type of intelligence, or an "INT," that spy agencies need to collect. Open-source intelligence is an ecosystem of new players who have their own incentives, capabilities, dynamics, and weaknesses. U.S. intelligence agencies can't just add more open-source intelligence and stir. They have to figure out how to deal with a world where anyone can collect and analyze information and make it available to the world. Much of this information can be useful, but it can also be dead wrong, deliberately misleading, and it can create unintended consequences. For example, third-party open-source intelligence could make crises harder to manage because their real-time "fact checking" could limit the ability of states to compromise, negotiate in secret, and use useful fictions to find face-saving ways to deescalate. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, we provided covert support to the Afghan rebels. The Soviets knew it and we knew the Soviets knew it, but both sides pretended not to know. That useful fiction helped keep the Cold War from escalating.

This too is a radical new environment for the intelligence community, and what it means is U.S. dominance and intelligence is declining. The playing field of intelligence is leveling, not to the advantage of the United States. For all of those reasons, emerging technology is creating a need for radical transformation of the intelligence community.

CTC: You've served on the National Security Council and have played a key role in various commissions related to AI and other intelligence reform topics. If you were back in the NSC or had a senior role in the DNI, what would be the top three initiatives that you would want to kick off so the U.S. could better prepare to tackle those five "mores"?

Zegart: That's such a difficult and good question. To the [Biden] administration's credit, I think there are a lot of people working on this problem. I'm not the first one to talk about it. As you mentioned, I was on the CSIS Technology and Intelligence Task Force co-chaired by Avril Haines [current Director of National Intelligence] and Stephanie O'Sullivan [former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence]. So there are a lot of smart people working on these problems; I didn't invent the awareness of the problem. But if I were in the seat of government today, I would focus on three drivers. Rather than specific recommendations, I think [about] what's going to drive reform over the long-term because this is an urgent and important issue, [and] we need long-term change. Number one, organization; number two, strategy; and number three, talent.

One of the things that I really felt very strongly about in the [CSIS] task force, and you'll see it in the report, was we need a dedicated open-source agency. I was reluctant to recommend a 19th intelligence agency because as we all know, when you have more agencies to coordinate, coordination becomes harder, and so if you're worried about coordination as I am, a new agency may not seem like such a great idea. But I'm convinced we need a new open-source agency. Much like air power didn't get the attention it needed until the Air Force became its own service after World War II, OSINT [open-source intelligence] will never get the priority or resources the nation needs without its own agency. There are open-source initiatives in the IC [intelligence community] already, but secret agencies will always favor secrets. For intelligence to succeed in this era, open-source intelligence has to be foundational. And for it to be foundational, it has to have a dedicated organization focused relentlessly and single-mindedly on that mission. So I think that organizational piece is key.

The second piece is strategy. What's our strategy and intelligence for emerging technology? We need one, and it needs to guide everything we do. And then the third thing, and I know they're focused on this and [CIA] Director [William] Burns is focused on this a lot, [is] talent. How do we get the right people in the door, and how do we get the right flow of people in and out of government in intelligence so that we can harness emerging technologies ourselves, developing better working relationships with the private sector, and better understand how technologies are driving the threat landscape?

CTC: [As you know], the challenge is not just for the intelligence agencies and the production of information, but it's also prepping the 'customers.' Are our senior leaders prepared to accept guidance drawn from open sources? And when you think about that broader range of customers, how do we prep them to hear from intelligence agencies so that those agencies can be effective?

Zegart: It gets also to, how do we have customers [that] become champions of intelligence reform, not just recipients of intelligence products? They go hand-in-hand. I think there has always been a need to educate customers about what intelligence can and can't do. Sue Gordon (a) has said to me in an interview that I use in the book: Policymakers always have some friction with intelligence because intelligence steals presidents' decision space. By that, she meant that intelligence often has to deliver bad news--telling presidents that events may be unfolding in ways they don't like and can't control. I think there needs to be an education function not just within the IC but among customers about what's possible with intelligence, what isn't, and why. And I don't think we're going to get there unless customers are partnering in the intelligence reform endeavor.

CTC: What should the intelligence community be learning from entities like Bellingcat and other data journalists that are taking innovative approaches to leveraging data or making interesting, novel use of open-source data?

Zegart: I think OSINT is too often viewed in the intelligence community as an INT. It's stuff that people can use, and I think that's wrong. OSINT is an ecosystem; it is a group of organizations and individuals, and what an open-source center should be doing is actually providing a node of engagement with the ecosystem so that it's not just how can we use the stuff that Bellingcat is producing or how can we use the tools that they're using today, but how can we have a continuous learning and collaboration process with a variety of open-source actors--and they're constantly evolving--so that we produce our own open-source stuff, but we're also engaging in that interaction with the open-source community? I think that's the most important thing that an open-source agency should be doing, is reframing it from the INT as a way of collecting stuff that we already collect towards viewing open-source as a whole new ecosystem of actors with its own capabilities, weaknesses, dynamics, and incentives.

But beyond that, I think Bellingcat is such an interesting example of, how can you harness the crowd without turning the crowd into a mob? And I think Bellingcat's done a really good job of that. Other open-source actors have not done as good a job at that, and it's an emerging ecosystem with norms and standards and training, and it's learning from Bellingcat: how were they able...