I really appreciate this opportunity to brag on them a bit. As i conclude, i want to say, enjoy your dinner. Tish long and i will be up here to have intelligent conversations and answer your questions. Thank you so much. [applause] please welcome back to the stage insa president suzanne hackenberg. [applause] suzanne i hope everyone has enjoyed dinner and is moving to desert. Before we resume, i have two quick announcements i would like to make well i have your attention. First, i am priest to announce the foundation today announced the seven Scholarship Recipients we have built over the past three years. Cumulatively, these scholarships are valued at 50,000. The rewards make a difference in the lives of undergraduate and graduate students all willing to work here for the rest of their lives. [laughter] three of our recipients are here with us this evening. I cannot help but point out they are all women. [applause] brooke rubert is a master student. Can you stand . [laughter] samira nooro is a master student at marymount university. [laughter] emily robert is a dual degree program. [laughter] [applause] i think our future is bright with these young ladies. If you have not had a chance to get to know them, i bet they are all pursuing careers as not doing internships. Thank you for joining us this evening. Finally, the registration open today for the new i. T. Program on september 27. The fullday program focuses on the challenges and opportunities our Community Faces is the bill foster and advanced gender inclusive and Diverse Workforce. We will have a wide ranging panel. Plus, plenty of networking time which is often which insa is often known for. It is my pleasure to introduce our moderator tish long. Her accomplishments are almost too many to count by well anyway. Deputy director of the dia. Principal deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence mentored a. As well as a terminal a chairwoman of the insa foundation. We are thrilled to have our conversation this evening with dr. This dr. Dixon. Over to you two. Thank you. Let me just as mike and welcome. A special welcome to our Scholarship Recipients. We have the good portion, stacy and icom are to have two of the recipients at our table. Our future is bright. I want to recognize stacy dixons parents as well. I had the good fortune of meeting them. When was it . Dr. Dixon 2010. 20 years ago. Stacy mentioned her promotion to capitol hill. So glad you could be with us this evening. You sent something in your remarks about i probably did not know you were going to be the pd dni. Dr. Dixon that is true. I dont have a crystal ball, but like your mother, i knew you were good people and i knew you would go far. I am not the smartest person so i like to surround myself with smartest people. A customer came up to me earlier and said dr. Dixon is the smartest person i know. I said yes, i hired her. Even if you did go to the other tech school. Thank you again for being here. We have been asking you for a little while so glad we could finally aligned calendars. As you can see, and lot of folks wanted to your from you this you think. I would like to key off a couple things you set in your opening remark. You talked a little about ukraine and russias invasion of ukraine and the impact this is having from a global perspective. One thing you did not mention, that we heard from the Principal DeputyNational Security advisor a couple weeks ago and he discussed the policy on what he refers to as strategic downgrades. It is all about information sharing and strategic youth of intelligence. Can you talk about this . Not only the impact it has had on the hostilities and the war, because that is what it is, but how are you thinking of the release of intelligence go forward . What is this mean about information sharing with allies, etc. . Dr. Dixon you can imagine we have been getting a lot of questions about this going word but in terms of how and initiatives vision, how we came up with the initial position, allies and partners are seeing things the same way. How do you have the conversation and make a decision knowing you have give up your sources to share this information . In conversations with the administration, it is a policy driven thing the Intelligence Community responded to. They wanted to respond to many things on many levels and the only way to do this would be to downgrade information. How do you downgrade for your partners . And the broader definition of partners, given the number of partners involved. Nato plus. The next question is, can you downgrade this . So how do you balance this hunger you created and being able to share more information. There is a lot of risk that happened by a lot of people in the community. It goes back to those losing the most with information revealed. We dont want to give up the information we had today that will prevent us from having this in the future. Our teams have worked really hard to try to get the downgrading process to move more quickly because of the speed needed and also the amount of requests coming in. Is there a Technology Aspect that can help with the speed of downgrading . I know a lot of human interpretation has to happen. We get a lot of smartphones and Technology Helping. Dr. Dixon right now there is not a lot of Technology Helping but we see the future where we have to increase our technology. Not everything needs to be classified forever so getting to the point where you let Technology Help you because there are a lot of holding, hitting the timeline where you review them for classification. There is legislation requiring us to look at how and when reclassified. We know we need to do it internally if nothing more than to make the process helpful to ease for folks who do this daytoday. Certainly with regular processing and there are tools we can leverage. And in getting the information out to the American Public. It is important. I want to come back to technology. Get flipside of where we started with downgrading intelligence to share with partners. There is a life information a lot of information and open source. We sometimes joke it joke if it is not secret, it is not worth looking at. I know that is not the case. I know the stacey dixon i know the odnis office is looking at that. Are we going to have a another agency in the community . Dr. Dixon our goal is not to have another one. There are studies suggesting that is what we need. We think we can accomplish the goal without starting another agency. The problem is you need a good portion of people just to run the agency. If you are looking at, has you keep organization small, that stuff away way to do that. How do you create a tradecraft and practitioner all consistently trained around the community to do open source intelligence. That is where we are headed. We have had opensource enterprise in the dia has opensource enterprise as well. We need more consistent training between practitioners by would be the first to say the community writ large is a lot of value as opensource. Back in the day, it weakens the criticisms that we were not good enough or true. We dont talk about them as much for good reason but we are interested in what it can do for us. How do you make sure everyone working in similar ways is treating this just like intelligence where there is a tradecraft and standard . There is going to be a Small Organization that will help get things kick started. Then you hand it back to functional managers to deal with it. Why do you think the community has not been able to do everything you said . Dr. Dixon we had an opensource organization, the Community OpensourceProgram Office in the late 90s. We have been talking about this for a long time. How can industry help . Dr. Dixon your commented that if it is not from a sensitive source we control means it is less trustworthy there is a piece of this we have to deal with. However, have to figure out what we can use it or and how we can trust it . How do you build a providence as initial starting point and then use your sensitive and more scarce info for other things . This is one thing without having the tradecraft. There are people whose first primary mission is to start using open source. We do not train people like this. Opensource for First Enterprise use focus on translation. There is more than just the translation part so we need to bring that in. What are the best things we can get from it . We can learn from organizations to get great intelligence for their own disciplines and needs for open source material. We have a lot to learn and industry can be a part of it. We both know nga is a good job in using commercial industry. The state department does a lot from their diplomats. There is a lot out there that is being used now. I think this is an initiative where i certainly hope you will make real progress. And i think others do as well. So lets talk about technology because technology can help you there. And just across the board. Maybe start with positive aspects. How is Artificial Intelligence being applied now . What are some shortfalls . Maybe initial Lessons Learned . Again, how can industry help . Dr. Dixon when you look at our community and how much data we are sitting on right now, your initial thought is this would be perfect for ai. Data that was collected for other reasons and is not tagged for ai use. There is a barrier to be able to use what we have but with data officers around the community, we are thinking about how do we make sure the data we have from this point on is ai ready . We have catch up to do for other data and then it is a matter of, do you call all resources into tagging . There is a love of cost that goes along with it. We cannot do the same thing china would do and have armies of people that do nothing but tag data. That is not costeffective for our community. This is one of the first run first lessons that ai was not ready for. Bringing in people now who can write the necessary algorithms on that level two understand the on that level and can understand the code. That is a good thing. It is a workforce we are developing. It is something that, as you mentioned with the data strategy, being able to have the relevant data as a workforce is a goal. We are using Machine Learning in certain really good cases to get effect. It is not nearly as widespread as anyone knows it needs to be. I have seen more in automation first steps. How do you make sure you get strategic things over and over again. The use of Machine Learning is the next one. To really use it to help you make decisions. This will be a step in the future. While we are doing this, we have the opportunity to build on the Civil Liberties protections and ai protections we need. We are trying to do this in a smart way. Do not want anyone to judge us as not having taken heed to what we are hearing. Researchers talk about the biases. How do we make sure we are not doing that . Chair long of course, there is a lot left to do. The technology has since changed so rapidly. How are you thinking about the guardrails, the framework, the ethical use of i hate to have to quested this because i am not sure we know what true is that have to question this because i am not sure we know what the future is. Dr. Dixon it will be a wild for the most critical decisions. We are excited about the technology and where it can take us. Because it is so widespread, the barriers to entry are so much lower that many adversaries, individuals who never would have been able to use this technology for their own purposes, now have access. One great thing is this is the advent of Large Language Models and the splash they made and av maintenance how quickly they were adopted for good and bad. They are looking to government to allow us, or encourage us, to create regulation and legislation in a way that will help protect without harming business. Recognizing there are a lot of people that will use this quickly for bad purposes. How do you make sure guardrails are there and models are protected . There are worries. But expecting what you can do with these models and unclassified data later, there is a lot of excitement. We want to do this in a smart way, methodical, having thought through the what if. Chair long it says something when you have ceos of Major Tech Companies citing letters to congress that we need to think about companies signing letters to congress that we need to think about the things happening here. Dr. Dixon there are certain fields where it has taken a long time for government and industry to work together. Cybersecurity for example. It has taken a a while to get to where there is trust between the organizations. We need to keep this. It is safe by everyone talking to each other and making sure if it happens to one organization, it is not just them. Shared protection is important. Chair long we are connected. There are cards on all the tables if anyone has questions. I have plenty but i do like to ask questions from the audience. I will merge one i received from the audience earlier with one i had, golf teeing off something you said. That the data was not ready for machine algorithms. He talked about new strategy. Can you tell us about this and what nearterm and midterm impacts this will have a Big Community . Dr. Dixon that is a good question in terms of timeline. Part of it is helping us think of ourselves as a data organization. We are intelligence, but the thing we are focusing on and have is data. If we continue to change the mindset of people to think about data first in terms of how you are building systems, it is to build data. It is not just intelligence being done in its own separate file. You want to use these things together to get effect. I dont know exactly what they will be able to achieve by having vision that bringing the data together earlier in the system and not waiting until the end will be very powerful. But we have to build systems. Today, mostly every organization is to be its own thing. So you have great Repository Data which is different from the other great Repository Data. There is more potential in the future if we build our systems from the mechanics. We have to come up with Data Management plans. How do you think about data and to and from the moment you collect it to how you will use it to how you will dispose of it . How do you make sure you have analytics on the scale or level you need it and at the speed you need it . These are things we need help with. Chair long to tie it back to something earlier is the declassification. Thinking about how you tag the data upfront for 25 years, down the road when you have mandatory class of mandatory declassification. Part of the audience question was do you see the introduction of multicloud helping . Dr. Dixon absolutely. I am excited that we have several cloud providers even at the ts level. They just added another one, i think. We are excited to have more in the family. It will be powerful for our community to have access. It helps with resiliency. You can open up a lot of opportunity for it. Chair long well said. A number of questions here. Lets see where we want to pivot next. This is actually to both of us. Dr. Dixon ok. Chair long i have never gotten a question for both of us. I was going to ask you, one of the things both you and dni haynes have talked about is developing the workforce. Yes, it is about the data. At the end of the day, it is about the people. I really like this question. As two strong, intelligent women , how do you help diversify the icy . Both government and industry. And how do you ensure youth are engaged and interested in the icy . The ic . Dr. Dixon one thing we have been doing is capturing the statistics of what our organization looks like. We are doing this now in a much more detailed and automated way, then showing results to the workforce. We have data dashboards that show the demographic makeup of our agency. And let us know what we look like compared to the American Public. Part of it is knowing where you are starting so you know where you need to head. With that, you can create great strategies of recruiting at schools that maybe dont see anyone from the Intelligence Agency come to them. Whenever i go out traveling, i try to tack on college and high school visits. Just to see students hearing about the Intelligence Community for the first time. Having someone say, there is a place for you here. If you want to come serve your country, or tech National Security, and get into interesting inns over the course of your career, not only are there people who look like you but those who are successful. Knowing who we are into we need to commute to really look like america. We do not always know the best way to talk to different communities so recruiter training and helping people understand how different communities hear the information we are providing. How to make sure we are not using triggering words or words that will turn off the community. We try to be smart about ways we are advertising but we have to hold ourselves accountable at the end of the day. We are changing to a system where we will work more with opm to collect more Demographic Data that we already collect, to find out people are not making it through the process. We need to be able to figure out this so we can deal with those barriers. I think it is terrific as you go out and travel that you tack on a visit to a college and high school. Chair long i think this is something all of us can be doing because it is about educating. It is not about how hollywood portrays the Intelligence Community. It is real life and what we today in and day out. We are all normal people, most of us are. Just being able to talk about what we do in real terms is really important. I think that is a terrific idea. And holding yourself accountable. Certainly, the companies i work with do the same. At the senior level, it is often tied to their compensation and compensation plans. Are you truly trying to build a Diverse Workforce . That is reflective of the American Public . Dr. Dixon we are trying to learn some of those best practices. Do we have a diversity, equity, and seclusion performance and objective and inclusion performance and objective . Chair long i think the marketing is interesting and industry has a leg up on the government. I can remember when i was Deputy Director dia and be brought in an outside Marketing Firm to look at our reading material into one relied of the rest of the community at our recruiting material and why we were lagging from the rest of the community. They looked at the pictures and they showed men in combat. It is a combat support agency. It might not have been the best way to attract women. We diversify our recruiting material and low and behold, it diversified our recruiting as well. Dr. Dixon there are certain folks who will never want to work with the Intelligence Community and will never work with the government. I want to make sure we are casting a wide net that those who are willing and able to and have the talent to, come in. We need to be more welcoming to make sure we do not have vacancies. Submission will be there and we need people to do it. Chair long and admissions are way cool. How are we doing at recruiting folks with the right tech background . Dr. Dixon we are doing better. We have the opportunity. I know the dod just past and agencies who did not have the ability before can now have higher pattern bonuses to be able to reward more technical skills. It does not compete with what people make in industry but it helps a little. We are losing people pretty quickly. Industry folks, you guys are making good offers to really good people and taking them from me. Chair long they recognize talent. Dr. Dixon they do. And they have lifechanging money from people about to put kids through college. I am hopeful they will come back but we are losing, especially in the i. T. Ways and cybersecurity, people. We need to figure out how to retake. Chair long how is the publicprivate Exchange Program going . Dr. Dixon it is getting there. We have policies written and have the first opportunity for Government People to go out into the industry between three months and three years, to bring industry into government. Right now the first area we are focusing on is space. We have identified an individual company and gone through the paperwork. In the next few months, we will get this kicked off. We have eight other industry we are targeting. There was a good number of people who came through the industry. I know some agencies do this. Thats a good question. Actually, it is for everyone. One of the peoples from a Different Agency peoples from a Different Agency. Chair long now that odni is almost out its teenage years, how do you see the role of the odni evolving within the ic over the next 20 years . Especially as we are talking about the potential for cure conflict for peer conflict . Dr. Dixon what i have seen over this last few years is a better understanding for alignment and what our needs are. How to be make sure we are answering the questions policymakers have in a way for them to be able to make the decisions they need to make. That has matured over time. Right now, we have a good understanding. There is a lot more that we did not have a lot of resources before. There is more threat finance and Economic Security and more on other aspects declining global health. We have to figure out, how to be mixed where the ic has enough people to make sure the industry and academia where expertise lies will partner with individuals. In the future, i see us going for a model where it is not that we grow bigger but we figure out how to leverage talent. And for those willing to help and support government need, to answer the questions we have access to. I hopefully also will see a much more sophisticated measure of the return of investment we make. We are working toward this and using datadriven analysis for not only money but people enclosing the intelligence gaps. We are trying to have dashboards to look at how we are doing to figure out, if you have another dollar, where is the best place to put this to mix where we continue to advance the cause of the mission . Chair long as a taxpayer, i appreciate this. One of the reasons the dni was established was to improve intelligence sharing. What great would you give the community now . [laughter] dr. Dixon it would be hard to give one grade. It would depend on particular issues. For certain issues, we are so well connected that i would have no problem giving us an a. For other issues, i am sure there is work to do. The nice thing about the daschle intelligence managers we have is the National Intelligence managers we have is we are able to look at the Health Assessment of the mission. We assess how well the debate with analysis and closing intelligence gaps. In the cases of working well, it is working really well. The number of collaborations that take place. I would say between c and a depended on the topic. Chair long thats fair. You are a hard greater so it is good thinking about that. And lots of questions are coming in and we only have five minutes left. He already know what by last question is i already know what mine last question is. What are the top three National Security challenges you think no one talks about enough . Therefore, is the proper focus there . Then i will give a part two. If there is one thing you can solve that a seemingly insurmountable, what would it be . Those are actually kind of different by put them together. [laughter] dr. Dixon i think we need to keep our eye on bio security. We saw the impact on what a natural virus did. Something engineered, targeted, could do worse in a shorter period of time. We need to keep our eye on that. I do see the Community Working more. Part of this is the ic working where with Health Focused organizations in government and academia to make swear we have questions answered. We are growing but i think we should be we have been more focused on chemical and Nuclear Areas than we have been on bio. Chair long i theres something i alluded to it like it is the fact that that technology is democratizing the ability for technology to aid people who want to use it for ill so, or nonstate actors, terrorist groups who should have no business with an Artificial Intelligence model that is going to actually deliver some, i dont know, deliver something that they would not have otherwise been able to do on their own. Now, has the potential to have data. Were talking about it a little bit but i think that is another area where the guard rails that we talked about, the need to protect what you have so that it doesnt get into the wrong hands, definitely needs to be uh talked about more. And that is a, those are conversa the number one issue was educating everyone in congress. That they had not done a great job educating their compatriots. In the Intelligence Community. I am glad you brought it up. Many, many people if not most everybody in this room do understand that section about id be great. But that is one thing if i could, if i, i want to see us be successful, reauthorizing, reauthorizing and not necessarily without any change, but reauthorizing it before it expires at the end of the year. That is a huge thing for the community. And, and at the intelligence and National Security smit, i had the honor to interview senators warner and rubio who, as you know, are both very supportive. And they said the nber one issue was educating, yes, everyone in congress that the intelligence committees had not done a great job educating their compatriots and that the Intelligence Community has not done a good job. So im glad you brought it up. So we could say that many, many people, if not most, everyone in this room do understand that section and understand the importance, understand the guard rails, right to use that term that are there the checks and balances. Dr. Dixon certainly from we will keep advocating, appreciate that and, and were putting out more information, weve got some great infographics that we now have on ndi. Gov, were trying to declassify more downgrade and declassify more examples. So people actually can understand the what like why is it important in having those conversations . Chair long and thats, you know it we often say, cant talk about what we do, we can talk about what we do, maybe not how we do it, but we can talk about what we do. If we can help in any way, please let us know. Before i get to the last question, we really havent talked about china so we could spend all night talking about china. What, what keeps you up at night about china . Dr. Dixon so most recently there was the news article that they had two Navy Officers that were just arrested for having passing secrets, right . Yes, so so china looks at us and thinks that were trying to contain china. What i say to that answer that question is, is china has a view of the world and the view of the future. It is a world that i dont want to live in that way. So we have a responsibility to make sure that we are working with likeminded countries to be able to make sure democratic principles, Democratic Values are out there. That means that weve got to do our best to figure out and navigate this, this period of competition and be prepared if there needs to be a period of conflict later on. But were going to be working as a community to make sure that we are able to protect ourselves. And a lot of that is protecting things that we have no control of in the government, right . Our Critical Infrastructure needs to be protected and we need to work with those partners out in public sector, out in states and locals. So this d. H. S. , f. B. I. , i. C. Partnership to get the word out, to educate, to help support as these organizations make themselves more resilient because all of us rely on strong Critical Infrastructure. Chair long i would also say that china does a pretty good job of containing themselves, you know, from a, you know, monitoring their people perspective. Dr. Dixon absolutely, absolutely. But theyre out there, they will, they will loan money, give money to people that, you know, we dont give to others quickly or will not give to in the same way. And they are making a lot of progress. They have a lot of connections and a lot of places in the world and while people go to them sometimes as a last resort, because they would rather have us as a partner, they will go get where the money is. And weve got to be mindful of that and think about the kinds of alliances that theyre able to have, even if theyre unwilling ones, they still have them and they have people who are moving away and dropping their affiliations with taiwan, for example. Right, because of chinas pressure on them because they took money. So theres an alliance theyre trying to build. But we also have very strong partners in many places who are getting a lot smarter about their dependencies on china and trying to make sure that they are resilient in the event that there are issues. Chair long as we were discussing africa during dinner. Dr. Dixon yes. Chair long ok. We have come to the end of the evening. Stacey, this question is from your mother. [laughter] its a great question. What do you do outside of work to ensure you maintain your worklife balance . And i bet actually a lot of people truly want to know the answer to that question. I mean, these jobs are extremely hard. They take a lot from you. They take a lot of time. In order to continue to do your best, you got to take care of yourself. So whats that strong intelligent woman doing to take care of herself . Dr. Dixon well, i am blessed to have family local, which is really nice. So i do make sure that i spend time with my parents, my brother, sisterinlaw, my niece. And then try to schedule time for friends of course, day to day. So there is exercise, theres eating right, theres drinking enough water and getting enough sleep. I cannot do them all at the same time, but i am trying to do as many of them as i can in any given week and trying to be mindful of that so that i can continue the long hours. The balance is not exactly there right now, but i am working to at least when im not at work to make sure that that is as fulfilling as it can be so that i can have that kind of balance in the time that i do have free. Chair long great answer. Better answer that i could ever have given and i ever did give when i got that question. Stacey, thank you so much. This, i believe, has been worth the wait and we really appreciate you coming tonight and speaking with all of us and having this conversation. Dr. Dixon my pleasure. Thank you, everyone, for coming out. [applause] and stacey, we have a baseball cap so you can enjoy that personal time while you take care of yourself. Chair long so i didnt ask the question about how was that first pitch. I saw the picture on instagram. Stacey got to throw out the first pitch at the nats game. If only you had your n. S. A. Hat on. Dr. Dixon not my best throw ever but i did not embarrass myself. I will say that. I wanted to make sure going and it was a lot of fun. I cant complain. It was really enjoyable time. We had some other folks from the Community Come out with check out us out at dni. Govs instagram because theyve got a slow motion throw as well as some great pictures of us on the field. So anyway, thanks. Thank you, stacey, for sharing your evening with us and if you all will just bear with me, i do want to thank our sponsors again. Amazon web. Del technologies, lockheed, tech, max. Microsoft, noble Reach Foundation or cloud dikinetic. Raytheon. University bush school. And of course, thanks everybody for sharing your evening with us. Please take home the flowers, share them with someone who might appreciate them compliments of programming later on in august. Have a good evening. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2023] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and this Years National book festival beginsayn the library of congress, feared authors will be there to startt. Coverage of the Opening Ceremony from the library of co begins at 7 p. M. E on cspan, cspan now our free mobile video app and online at span. Org. Cspan. Org. This weekend brings you two days of book tv, beginning with the library of congress National Book festival, live a saturday at 9 a. M. Eastern, on sunday at 2 p. M. , coverage of the 2023 roosevelt reading estimate at the president ial library in hyde park new york. At 9 p. M. , jack cashel shares his book about the white flight from u. S. Cities starting in the 1970s and causes behind it. Watch book tv every weekend on cspan two. Find a full schedule on your Program Guide or watch online at book tv. Org. Coming up next, former National Security advisor Robert Obrien talks about securing supply chains and managing economic challenges with china. He also comments on the Semiconductor Industry and the importance of selling goods to china versus investing. The conversation comes from the hudson institute