Transcripts For CSPAN3 Amy Zegart Spies Lies And Algorithms 20221004

Governors and the Biden Administration cabinet. Order your coffee today at cspan shop dot org, or scan the code with your smartphone, everythings been shot purchase helps support cspans nonprofit operation. Orris a i would like to welcome you back to the Hoover Book Club away bring friends and fellows together to discuss the writing. Our guest today is amy amy zegart. She is a professor of Political Science by courtesy at stanford university, also a fellow and chair of their Artificial Intelligence and international committee. And a contributing writer at the atlantic, but wait, there is more. She is also a book author, her latest title being spies, lies, and algorithms, a future of american intelligence. Great to see, you congratulations on the book. Great to see you as well, its always nice to finish a book rather than just be writing one. That leads to my first question, i just listed countless things you are doing in and around the stanford world, how do you have time to write a book . Covid helped, we could not get together, we could not travel, i moved all my books to my home office and hold up and that is how i was able to finish. It took a lot of structured time away from the office to get it done. And just a lot of discipline, i guess, ideal in column writing but a book is a different creature. I cannot do what you do, i am afraid of writing was a deadline, if i have a deadline that is several years away but if it is several hours away that is another story. Stick to what you do, what you do is thoughtful. Lets talk about the book, spies, lies, algorithms, lets break it down into category. Amy, spies, what are we talking about we talk about spies . Let me take a step back, the purpose of the book is really to inform a general audience about what the secret world of intelligence is. Spies usually get peoples attention, i think there are a lot of myths about what spying is, even the basic terminology. You can call someone a spy and they are not really a spy, a spy is a forerunner that betrays their country for our cause, not the cia officer who is running them. I think one of the main points of writing the book is to dismantle summits. I will give you my top three myths. Myth number one is that intelligence is secrets. Most of intelligence is actually not secret, 80 of a typical report is open Source Information. Myth number two, intelligence policy, spies are out here learning about policy, they are not supposed to do that and the usually do not. And, i think the third big miss is covert action is this bag of dirty tricks that we reserve in the most horrible things that our government does. That is not true either. We do anything overtly that we do covertly, to make something over is that the u. S. Government tries to hide its official responsibility for it. So, who is the covert action . Morris over action, we do everything overtly that we do covertly. What comes to mind is this documentary, oliver stone and the movie jfk, which just celebrated an anniversary and gets to two things, number one, the movie, but secondly it is oliver stone opening his head and revealing what he thinks about the jfk assassination, and vietnam, and intelligence. Before you know what you are on a very dark road and what the u. S. Government does and does not know and not reliving the days of cia and cuba trying to feed fidel castro poisoned cigars and things like that. The public is being fed a lot of information, maybe that is not quite accurate. Yes, and what we see in Public Opinion polling is this dramatically rising belief in conspiracy theories of all types. So, one of the most stunning polling results i have found was that, even a few years ago, 25 of americans believe 9 11 was an inside job by the u. S. Government. A quarter of americans believed that, a lot of what i am trying to do is dispel these crazy conspiracy notions about what the Intelligence Community is really doing. Right, that also advanced technology, i need you to unpack that a quarter of americans think 9 11 was inside job, i am not sure but the poll saying about vaccines is but i am sure there is a healthy portion of the population thinks that vaccines are for bill gates to microchip you. I do not know if it is technology or maybe it is the media and pop culture, i think this is what youre getting out in your book, it is just a lot of what the government does and does not do on intelligence, it is sort of polluted by what pop culture gives us and academia teaches us. Yes, im glad you raise that because what a regionally dominated in writing the book, which was many years ago when i really started thinking about it, was a poll i did of my College Students at the time at ucla. And, on a lark i asked them a bunch of questions about intelligence, and then what their television and movie viewing habits were. And, what i found was that a statistically significant percentage of them were affected by their entertainment. Or at least, there were correlations, those who said they always watch the show 24 with jack bauer were far more willing to advocate really aggressive intelligence policies, like waterboarding, for example. What i found the more i dug into this was that spy themed entertainment had actually become adult education, and i found all sorts of evidence in this in National Polls and the policy world. Okay, the book you are talking about, espionage going back to the days of George Washington. So, this government must have a rich tradition of being involved in espionage, how does espionage differ today versus it did back in the days of the Founding Fathers . That is such a good question, in some ways it is really similar, more similar than we might think. So, we think about Information Warfare as an internet invention, when in fact Benjamin Franklin was really good at Information Warfare. He cranked out literal fake news articles from his paris bateman. It is different today, primarily, in three ways. Number one is spade, everything is moving faster, now. The speed of data, the speed of insight, the speed of decision. So, espionage has to keep pace with what Decision Makers need to know when they need to know it. So, everything is accelerating today, that is a really hard challenge for intelligence agencies. The second scale, so, if we think about i have a chapter in the book about traitors and Counter Intelligence. It used to take years for people to smuggle documents out in their pants and garbage bags, and all sorts of crazy ways to try to betray their country. But, now, traders can download documents, millions of documents in a matter of minutes, hours, months. So, the scale of espionage and particularly Counter Intelligence is completely difference. So, the third key difference was espionage today is that there has been a democratization of capability. It used to be that superpowers like the United States had a Real Advantage in espionage, only the u. S. Government, and maybe the soviet union could launch a billion dollar satellites and have path massive capabilities. Now anyone can gather that kind of data, anyone can analyze that kind of data. Ai capabilities are available on the internet, they do not require a degree in Computer Science, we have satellite imagery, we have access to the internet, you have access to google earth. And its our live tweeted, you can track things on twitter. So, now we have to think about intelligence competitors today, being much more spread out and a much more crowded Playing Field for u. S. Intelligence agencies. Who are the competitors . The main competitors are nation states, of course, but anybody can do this now. If you think about on the good guy side of things, we think about Nuclear Threats there all sorts of people outside the u. S. Government tracking Nuclear Threats. Some of them are colleagues at stanford, but, in the past year, for example, news came to light about these hundreds of Chinese Nuclear missile silos that were previously unknown. That came to light because of people without security clearances, without access to classified information, just using commercial satellite imagery and their expertise, and posting that online. Right, so, you have people looking at google earth shots of Chinese Naval yards and north Korean Missile sites and whatnot saying something looks bad,. But, why are they doing this . Is the u. S. Government doing this and we just do not know about it . You mean is the u. S. Government tracking these things are working with these people . It is a little scary to think that some individual, not a vigilante but an individual is reporting, look at these chinese ships being built in a naval yard and does the u. S. Government now . I like to think the u. S. Government is stuck ahead of that individual . So, the u. S. Government is aware of what is going on, in many cases partnering with non governmental nuclear sleuths, as i call them. There are partnerships, some are more formalized than others but you can put your finger on a key point. Which is that, right now this ecosystem, at least in Nuclear Security is dominated by americans and our western allies. That will not be the case in the future, right . It is open, anyone can join this world and we have already had instances where last benign actors, or nefarious actors are deliberately trying to inject falsehoods into this ecosystem in the hopes of the u. S. Government will fall for it. It is going to get more complicated, they will be bad actors and more of them. The government is aware of, it theyre trying to figure out ways to engage more productively with this non governmental ecosystem. Right, lets talk about the u. S. Government apparatus, i was watching the armynavy football and the commercial came up, it was trying to get you to join the army to get involved in counterintelligence and stop hackers, showing the tagline and all of the branches of the armed services. It got me thinking, who drives the train these days . It is the military . Is it the nsa . Is the cia . It is Online Security . We seem to have a lot of these days for the umbrella of intelligence and counterintelligence. So, the unsatisfying answer for who drives the train today is, it depends. We have 18 different agencies, the u. S. Intelligence today. 18 agencies, we say about the cia and maybe the nsa but there are lots, and, that it is much higher than it was ten or 20 years ago. The result is it is hard to coordinate them all. Not only in charge of this community is the director of National Intelligence. That is getting better, the dni has only limited control over judgments and people. And, as you know, in washington those are two very powerful levers. You cannot control the budget or the people, theyre trying to dissuade or control. It is a lot work in project. The 18 need to be fold into a dozen, for six, what would you downsize . That would you create a super agency . How would you streamline this . Well, streamlining is hard, but, people arm russell over this all the time. Do we have too many . Do we not have enough . The benefit, i will give you the argument on one side, they basically have so many agencies. The navy has different intelligence needs than the army, the Intelligence Unit to help it. There was real truth to that, different agencies so the cia is human intelligence. National Security Agency is signals intelligence and phone calls. Specialization has benefits so i always use the example of doctors no one, questions whether doctors should be specialized, you do not want your heart surgeon detecting skin cancer and you did not want your dermatologist operating on your heart. The specialization has benefits. The challenge is how do you harvest specialization so that people now. The specialization importance is in empowering the dni, that has empowered some real dividends. It is still a challenge. It is a challenge, amy, getting people to talk to each other. Another takeaway from 9 11, just across in washington. Yes, that cross chatter communication is much more important than it used to be, which is not saying a whole lot. The bar was low before 9 11. I have a heretical idea, a lot of people argue with me about this. What we actually, really, need most is a 19th intelligence agency. I say that with some trepidation because of the coordination challenges we just talked about. May 19th agency would be dedicated entirely to open source intelligence. Stuff that is publicly available out there on the internet, because what has happened with this, but we are talking about technology, because of the advent of new technologies, right . A whole intelligence battleground has changed. It used to be that secrets where more of a key. Secrets still matter. But, now incites still come from a harnessing openly available data. And, secrets will always be primary. And secret agencies. So, no existing agency is giving Public Information the attention that it deserves. Howyou are not going to get tht lets you get a good indigenous. Trying to harness a new agency stones a little bit like drinking from a fire hydrant in terms of collecting information. How would you physically, what you just have an army of nerds in pajamas in basements around the world going through it . How would you actually attack that . Well, a lot of it would be, how can Technology Help us with technology . How can things like ai, tools, augment the human analysts . We have far too much data for anybody to process at any one time. Just to give you some idea, the amount of data is estimated on earth to double every 24 months. Right . That is an astounding level of data. Algorithms can help make sense of that data, let me give you an example of something that was actually tempered in the last two years. I had two colleagues who wanted to better understand trade between north korea and china. What they decided to do was look at the imagery of trucks crossing between the borders, between these two countries. Lets go back several years, they thought, lets analyze the truck traffic between these two, just to get a sense of what can we derive from looking at this . And so, we got no Computer Science training, they developed a Machine Learning algorithm so that the machine would automate the scanning of the trucks cross the border. Right. And what we take a human analyst abruptly a month to do, the basic algorithm did in 20 minutes. That is the kind of benefit we can get from harnessing technology to understand this overwhelming crush of data. Right, but you still need the Human Element to eliminate what certain somebody would call fake news. Absolutely, the idea is that when you use the automated tools it frees up the human to do what humans can do vast, no machine is going to be able to understand the intentions of north korea. Or to consider alternative hypothesis, or to ask why is this the case. It is just pattern recognition, that is the real benefit of these tools. Right, so where with that 19th agency sit in the flow chart of the federal government . [laughs] you are really pushing me, and a good way, bell. That 19th agency would be independent, there has been a big debate about how could you put the agency in the cia, or in the state department . I think it needs to be a standalone agency, heres the thing, it should not be inside the beltway, or at least not entirely inside the beltway. Because, if you want to attract the best minds of tomorrow you need to go with the talent lives. Imagine a former deployed agency with offices in places like silicon valley, austin, texas, denver, colorado. And now you have this open source stuff. So, you can experiment with new Technology Tools in a more ongoing way. It is not just the staff that an open Source Agency can provide, it is the people and it is the processing. Okay, you want to agencies it is independent outside of washington. It is time for heretical thinking. This is my way of saying, amy, good time to grab water if you have a bayou. On the 20th anniversary, 20 years after 9 11 the United States faces escalating threats from china, russia, iran, and north korea. Conflicting cyberspace as well as physical space. And global challenges like Climate Change and pandemics. The cia needs to regain the balance between fighting terrorist enemies up today and providing the intelligence to protect, understand, and stop the enemies of tomorrow. Yes, and, this is something where people inside the Intelligence Community have been discussing this balance for a long time. It is interesting, bill, i got a lot of feedback from that article. More than i have in just about anything ive written in the past couple of years. People in the government think this was exactly the case. Intelligence you have the balance between dealing with urgent and dealing with important threats. And, my argument was there is no organization other than the cia whose primary mission, primary mission, is preventing strategic surprise. Right. And, the more the cia get sucked into the day today counterterrorism paramilitary activities and supporting them, the last time it has to prevent strategic surprise. With all of these other threats in the world, and so, they balance has tilted far too much towards tactical war fighting intelligence. And, that is not to say it is an important, but, it has to be balanced. And as the irs balances out of whack, and is to get back to a more balanced portfolio of activities. Ed pretty the last time this s mission wouldve been examined wouldve been, what, the mid 70s . I think it was examined carefully after 9 11. There was that surge of activity. Weve got pretty good at the supportive counterterrorism activities. It was a success at one moment, but, the Threat Landscape never sleeps. And so, we have to constantly adapt. It is a moment, i think, for pretty dramatic change in intelligence, today. I am curious about who has to work for intelligence in United States, my father, may he rest in peace, went to the university of virginia in the 1950s. He told me onetime, the government was very present on the campus in three regards. Well as the military, my father was rotc in a lot of kids there were rotc, another one was the state department recruiting. They want to bright young men and women to go into foreign service. The third, amy, was the cia. Which my father said would discreetly stop by once a year and encourage young man to sit down and take a Aptitude Test to see if they could have what it took to get into the world of espionage. So, is the cia doing the same . Are they going around the country looking for people on campuses or where are they drawing talent . I think the cia, to its talent, is increasingly drying talent from across the country, though it used to be age or talent, back in the old days, from a very small set of students, right . Mostly on the east coast, as well. Those days are really gone, i think the cia has really recruited from a much broader talent pool, i think the internet helps us as well because it is easier to go on the cia website and see what it is about. But, there is still big problems with cia recruiting. And, director burns has talked about one of them probably, which is that it takes too long to get people through the security clearance process, through the hiring process, and in the door. Two years on average. If youre talking about record in the best and brightest, they have a lot of other opportunities while theyre waiting through those two years. Once they are in other jobs it is much harder to then recruit them to go inside. That lag time between someone wanting to join the agency and when they actually can has got to drink. Director burns has said one of his primary goals is shrinking that time from two years to six months. Why does it take two years . I wish i knew the answer to that, bill. Obviously you have to that someone, but two years is a long time for that. It is a really long time, and the backlog is insane. And, i do not know why it takes so long, i do not know why we cannot accelerate it. It will be interesting to see if the agency can do it, i can tell you i have a number of cases of former students who really wanted to serve their country, went through this process, and it took so long by the time they heard back from the agency they had already committed to other things. Okay, your thoughts on the trump administrations china admission . This was the initiative in 2018 to counter chinas economic espionage. I think the idea that this is a problem is a correct diagnosis, right . Our universities are wide open, we know that china is committing rapid espionage the fbi opens a new china Counter Intelligence investigation on average once every ten hours. So, this is a real no kidding problem. The question is, how do you attack it . I think there has been a lot of criticism, justly so, that countering chinese espionage can lead to xenophobia, racism, can lead to unjustly accusing loyal american citizens, naturalized citizens, betraying their country when they did not. The correct agnes of the problem, concerned about the remedy at not actually solving the problem. Maybe making things worse. I think m. I. T. Is Technology Review just took a study of the Chinas Initiative and came to the conclusion that it might have the right intention but just found a lot of the cases have very little obvious connection. They did not have an impact on national security, it sounds like we are discussing an awfully wide net. If we want to dig deeper, why did this program go semester i . I think part of the problem is the fbi is still in its bounds a Law Enforcement agency. It is designed to look for perpetrators who commit crimes after the fact. This challenge is an intelligence challenge. It is a challenge of piecing together information to try to prevent bad things from happening. It requires much more analysis, the fbi has always struggled to improve its analytic abilities. I think it is really telling that today, no analyst, by fbi regulations, can lead an fbi field office. Right . So, you have to have operators, the folks with the guns, they are the only people who can lead in office. It tells you how little shocked the agency puts on good analysis. Okay, lets talk about the fbi for a second. Fifth, a federal jury convicts a gentleman, the Chinese National and director of the fifth ministry of state security. He was convicted of conspiring to commit economic espionage. What stands out here as he is the First Chinese Intelligence Officer to stand trial. Ler amy. He was convicted of twos of conspiring and in tempting to commit espionage, also conspiracy to commit trade secret brett, along comes the assistant director of the fbis Counter Intelligence commission and heres what he said, quote. This was state sponsored economic after espionage but peoples republic of china to steal American Technology to put americans at work, for those who doubt the real goals of the prc this should be a wake up call, they are stealing American Technology to benefit their economy and military, the fbi is partnered with over 50 government agencies, u. S. Government agencies to share information and investigative resources to stop these illegal activities. Now we have gone from 18 intelligence agencies, amy, 50 u. S. Government agencies involved in trying to track down chinese bad guys. From the way you presented that, bill, it sounds like you share my skepticism that coordination across 50 different agencies is going to be seamless. So, on the one hand this is encouraging, this is a whole of society problem, not a whole of government problem. And, we have to have the fbi working in coordination with other agencies to do it. The question is, are we attacking this in the right way . Right. So, i have real concerns about how the bureau is approaching this challenge. I think that one of the ways that we should be thinking about it, there are a number of ways. Number one, they found that there are, for example, tens of thousands of chinese graduate students of the United States studying today. We want to encourage bringing people from china, i want the students to come here, stay here, get a visa, become americans, and support our country. The fact that there are 35,000 chinese graduate students tells me there are 35,000 American Students who were not good enough to get in. Part of the challenge of dealing with chinas Counter Intelligence challenge is figuring out how we up our own game. How do we have our own Education System produce more people at the cutting edge of this field . And, how do we raise awareness to basic awareness about keeping our key technologies within the country . Education can go a long way towards dealing with Counter Intelligence. To give you an example, if i am concerned about a Counter Intelligence issue on the stanford campus, who do i call . What are the protocols . Where is the brave trust that figures this out in policy so we can adjudicate between the costs and benefits of taking one step or another . Are those consistent across American Research universities . There is a lot that is unknown and undeveloped because there is this third rail attitude about chinese espionage. Chinese espionage is real, that is not to say that every chinese graduate student should be put under suspicion. But, it is to say we need to think hard about the best way to attack this problem. Theres only one way to look at the story and that is that he was caught redhanded and you could either see this as the coming attractions or whos being held up as an example. If this is a preview of coming attractions, what i am curious about is how does china respond to us cracking down on espionage . Do they start arresting americans in china, for example . Well, it is interesting. China, our espionage Human Network in china was blown, i mean, really blown. Several years ago, destroyed. There is a big question about why that is. There is no question that it happened. Our assets in china, many of them were executed. Many of them were imprisoned. This is all publicly available information. If we are talking about afortat response one of the Silver Linings in the otherwise dark cloud that human is that there are not that many sources the United States has today for them to arrest. I mean, it is a pretty dark cloud. I am grasping for Silver Linings here. Would china rest americans . Well, we see china arrest comedians citizens in pure retaliation for the arrest of the Chinese Nationals in canada. I would not put anything past the she jinping for jim. Lets talk the economic secrets of russia. It seems like they are after mischief. They also seem to be after money if you look at the ransomware attacks. What do they have in common . They are not launched by elation states, criminal games, or any purposes in mind. They want money. The kremlin seems to sanction what they are doing. What is the u. S. Reaction to what is going on in russia . Well this is a motivator of all sorts of bad activity. We see the Biden Administration really struggle with this problem, understandably so. Ransomware is a hard problem to attack because crime pays. There is always going to be someone who did not install the patch or configure their networks properly. So, the victims are aplenty. Ransomware is going to continue. I think the general command said that he does not see ransomware going away anytime soon. I will say, the Biden Administration, as you know, held the summit. A working group of more than 30 countries around the world tried to collectively raised the cost of ransomware. They tried to develop common collaboration and approaches. I think that is a promising start. We have to raise the cost and make it harder for ransom to succeed. We have to improve coordination in likeminded countries to go after major corporates. Amy, if the cold war is designed with virtually a shush can we say cyber war should fare is a mutually to struck things . You shut down a pipeline you are just stopping it. If you take down someones grid, the grid will come up eventually. You are just using it for ransom extortion, if you will. Am i missing something . Can cyber action be used in the same way you can use missiles to take things out . I think cyber is actually not a world of rule you truly assured destruction. I think it is actually worse. I think it is asymmetric destruction. So, we can actually not hold other countries in mutual risk, like we can with Nuclear Weapons and the cold war. That kept the cold war cold. We are asymmetrically vulnerable in the United States. We rely on Computer Networks and systems for everything in our society. For our economy military, education. In a way that other countries do not and we are asymmetrically vulnerable because of our freedom of speech. So, so russia can polarize society by spreading false narratives about everything because we are open. And so, we are disproportionately vulnerable because we are a western capitalist democracy. We are vulnerable in ways that authoritarian regimes are not. I think it is much more complicated in cyberspace, and it requires less deterrent in this mutually assured destruction. And we have to get back to basics about defense all making our system harder to penetrate, and resilience. Making them able to get back in operation if and when there is an attack. Getting back to basics. So, amy, something of a threeway struggle between the uk, germany, and russia. And it is over the uks desire to extradite a suspected spy from russia. Reportedly, this is a german man who was convicted of passing for plans. I am curious, why is russia engaging in espionage with this . Is this a reflection of Vladimir Putin being a kgb guy . He likes to thrive this way . What is russias endgame of doing this. I wish i could get inside the mind of Vladimir Putin to tell you. I do not know what his endgame is. I think he is a kgb guy. He never met an intelligence operation he did not like. And, he is very risk excepted. So, one of the things that strikes me about what he has done an espionage is he has violated the fundamental rules of the road that existed for the entire cold war. So, you think about moscow rules. There were unwritten norms about that keeping the guardrail in place during the cold war. So, you know, we would not kill a soviet asset. They would not kill an american asset. We would imprison each others spies, and then we would swap, them for example. But, think about what putin has ordered. He tried to kill a former Russian Military officer, and his daughter living in london. He sent a hit team out to kill them both. That is extraordinary. That is not the only time he has tried to do it. So, what you see is a blatant disregard for prying rules of the road. In just about every aspect of foreign policy. You see putin violate these things in every aspect of foreign policy. I am curious, what is russias endgame . Chinese espionage, it is very simple. It is a competition for economic supremacy and military supremacy. So, very geostrategic. But i am not sure if the russians are knocking around and trying to get building plans in the german parliament. I think, as you rightly pointed out, china is very strategic. Everything that china does is very strategic and russia is much more tactical. There may be no strategic purpose for what putin has organized. It could just be too mock up the works of other countries. If it were simple to rate various countries modus operandi, are we the best in the world . Are we in the top ten . Where would you rank us. I would certainly put us in the top tier. I would like to say we are number one, because i think the United States is a great country, but i am more worried that china has surpassed us on the intelligence front in a couple of ways. You talked about theft of economic trade secrets and intellectual property. This is a huge deal. We think that power, today, is not what it used to the. Power is not military. We spend the most of our military, we have the most powerful military in the world, but we are not the most powerful country in the world in the way that we used to be. Because, economic power is much more powerful. And so, china is poised, really, to overtake the United States in terms of technology, and economic power. There was a result bites harvard just last week. It is pretty scary, actually, to read those results. I think china is, largely, leapfrogging the United States and building its technology. It has stolen its way ahead of us to a large extent. So, i put china ahead of us in terms of that element of espionage, in terms of countering our own networks in china. But, i do not think it is a permanent advantage. I think we have sources of strength that are enduring intelligence advantages. We have a much more eclectic workforce that speaks many different languages, and comes from many different cultures. That is a huge intelligence advantage for us, for example. Our open society and innovation and technology to call tools could be a huge advantage if our community can harness them and use them for insight. So, we have the capabilities. I think we have not exploited them, enough, in intelligence. Right, where would you put israel in this equation . If one thing popped tells us they are really good at intelligence. They are gutted tracking or disrupting nuclears aran the israelis always complete their mission. They always get the job done. Israeli intelligence is super. In the top tier i would put the u. S. , china, russia, and israel. The israelis are super on the technical side. They are super on the human side. They are super at analysis. And by the way, theyre very active at spying against the United States. Make no mistake about. It our allies spy on us and we spy on them with rare exception. Right, that is what i want to get to next. The rules of the road. It is okay to spy on our allies. You know, there is a very small group of countries that actually did not spy on each other. And they are the five eyes. So the u. S. , the uk, canada, australia, and new zealand. Those five countries have a very close intelligence partnership. Beyond that, it is a jungle. Everybody is spying on everybody. And, we know. It the french spy on us. We want to understand what eu countries are doing. What their political decisionmaking is. Where they are likely to go with respect to china. That is how this game works. Everybody knows it. Okay, does the United States spy on itself . What do you mean, what do you mean in terms of do we spy on itself . Do we do domestic coverage worrying about islamic terrorism, domestic terrorism, how does intelligence in the United States turn upon the American Population . So, the u. S. Intelligence community has very clearly legal prohibitions about domestic surveillance. So, one of the things that really makes the u. S. Stand apart is our Intelligence Services are not trained on or should not be, with rare exception, and have not been on domestic surveillance. So, if you think about russia, russia, right, the intelligence apparatus is aimed at its own people. Deliberately so. The fbi is the only organization and u. S. Intelligence community that has this as part of its mandate. Domestic intelligence collections. So, it is with rare exception that an agency like the national Security Agency would collect, deliberately, against americans. When it did, after 9 11, with so reported war surveillance program, it was a big controversy. Not just among the American People but inside the nsa, itself. There is a lot of debate and concern about targeting, and remember, this was not the. Contents of communications, i want to be clear. This was the nsas Metadata Program which was to understand, basically, your telephone call records. The number you call how long the call was, it was not the kind of call and the identity of the person you were calling. And the idea was, it could be, then, that we query that data, the nsa, to see if terrorists in custody had called any of those numbers, or numbers related to those numbers. So, this was the program that generated a lot of controversy with rare exceptions in this targeting americans. That program was ended by congress. So, ultimately, i think the oversight regime worked. What are the lessons of the patriarch, amy . I think the lessons of the patriot act, or for the Intelligence Community, to become more forthcoming about what it is doing earlier. That is an unnatural act for intelligence agencies. But, the man who ran this agency said, he believed it was a political mascot for the agency not to share with congress and the American People sooner what it was doing so that if people knew about it they would have, after 9 11, supported it. I think he is right about that. I think that tendency of intelligence agencies to keep too much secret, it actually hurts the public trust they have to have to do their jobs. You know, looking at american president s, amy, i think there was one, george h. W. Bush who was director of the cia at one point. I think every other president , amy, who came into office did not have that kind of intelligence backgrounds. Maybe joe biden is familiar with the intelligence apparatus from his years in the senate, and Vice President , and so on. It seems to me a lot of president start from scratch when they come to the white house. They first get their Intelligence Briefings and deal with the Intelligence Community. Sometimes they find frustration. Jack kennedy famously wanted to break the cia into 1000 people says after the fiasco. You are nodding your head in accordance, i see. How should an incoming president face to prepare for the Intelligence Community . Is it as simple as trust what you get . Should we go back to the days of gorbachev . How does the president learn to accept the intelligence he or she is given . I think president s need to understand that intelligence is not a crystal ball. Because, all president s want intelligence to tell them what is going to happen. And nobody can do that. President s, i think, they also need to understand that as susan gordon put it, she was the number two intelligence official from 2017 to 2019. She said, all president s are frustrated because we steal their decisions. And by that she means that intelligence agencies have the job of telling president s things they might not want to hear. How their policies might not work. How things are going in Foreign Countries in ways that the president does not like. And so, president s need to understand that. But i would argue that skepticism is a good thing for president s to have. Intelligence agencies do not have a monopoly on insight of what is going to happen in the world. They are doing the best they can. There is no such thing as ground truth in the intelligence business. Skepticism is healthy. Debate is healthy. And so, i think for a president to use intelligence effectively they should be pushing the Intelligence Community. How do you know this is the case . What are the alternative assessments . How would we know if you are wrong . I think that kind of dialogue between the president and his Intelligence Community, it is actually a very healthy thing to have. Okay, pearl harbor, 9 11, and directly wmds. What do they have in common . Intelligence fiascoes. One way or another, is there a Common Thread between them, amy . The Common Thread is, at least for me, it is i see everything through an organizational lens, for me the Common Thread of those is that the organization is the problem. That you are going to put superman in charge of intelligence in pearl harbor and 9 11 in iraq. And, you still would have got an intelligence failure. Why . The case of pearl harbor, we had cues of japans intent . And the likelihood of the attack at pearl harbor . We did not put those together in time . Right . It is too fragmented. That is why we got the Central Intelligence agency. 9 11, same thing . We had 23 opportunities to trade that. It is research i have done on the cia and fbi. They missed every single one. In part because they could not share or coordinate what they were doing. Wmd is a little bit of a different story. There it was really a collection failure. They did not collect the right information. Our Intelligence Analyst did not scrub there thinking enough to ask, what if saddam were actually not developing his weapons of mass destruction . So, again, this was an organizational problem. And so, there were a lot of reforms after iraq to improve that. So, dissenting views are now a lot more highlighted in National Intelligence estimates. Before they were relegated to footnotes. People were busy and they do not tend to read footnotes. So if you have this point of view it needs to be in the body of the texts. As a result, iraq now has much greater attention to how our intelligence are making judgments. Organizational problems with organizational solutions. Are people willing to speak up within this community . Pop culture shows us argo, for example, where ben affleck plays the ceo that says, by gosh, we are going to do it this way and shoots down the others. You get this harrowing idea because he is willing to but the system and defy the status quo. Does intelligence really look like that in real life . I think when it works, well it does. One of the great examples people coming to different points of view, with a hunt for Osama Bin Laden. There is this great moment, this white house situation, there is a meeting where president obama goes around the world to his room and says what do you think the percentage is, in this room, that the sky we have been following is actually Osama Bin Laden . He goes around the room, and the estimate, they have all read the same intelligence, the estimates range from 40 , we think it is bin laden, to 95 . Now, i think this is fascinating. Why is this the case . Well, it turns out that the percentage estimates really hinge on the analysts prior experience. So, those who were burned by iraq wmd were much more skeptical that this was actually happening. Those who had come off of recent intelligence success in counterterrorism will much more confident in what they had. The same information, different probability estimates. That is a good thing to have people talking through their differences and why they believe what they believe. Okay, so getting back to the idea of getting information, yes or no from cultured. Zero dark thirty get the whole story right . You know, i could go on for a long time about this and why that movie makes me crazy. So, no, the short answer to your question is no. Zero dark thirty does not get it right. So, quickly, what did it get wrong . Actually, the scene that i have just told you, this meeting about, it is one of the good scenes in the movie. They actually capture that really well. And there is this wonderful scene where the main analyst name maya says it is 100 percent that it is bin laden. And then she says, well, 95 , because i know certainty freaks you guys out. That is very true to life. The part of the movie that really upsets me, and disturbs me, is that it gives the impression that enhancing tara geisha and methods, very controversial methods which some regard as torture where the critical keys to finding been lawton. And, in fact, do not take my word for it. The acting cia director, when the movie was released, a guy named mike morel, he was also so concerned that the movie portrayed itself as a documentary, right, because it starts by saying, based on firsthand accounts of actual events, that sounds much more documentary style than hollywood, he had written a memo to the cia workforce clarifying that the movie was not factual. He focused on this specific issue that there were multiple strains of intelligence that led to bin laden. And that these detainees and first interrogation techniques were only one part of what led to this. So, when the head of the cia wrote a memo to the cia about the cia that movie is not just a movie. I think we should start a new podcast. Picking apart intelligence movies. Our goal has the same problem. You see, the ending in argo, the real life version of what happened is nowhere near as dramatic as sitting on the airplane with the iranians chasing him down the tarmac, and so forth. Only in hollywood, you have to have drama. Right, i like the idea of a separate podcast dissecting intelligence movies. Everyone loves movies. I love my homework to be more spy movies. I love them as much as the next person. You could do james bond to. Apparently it will be transgender in the next one. There wont be a politically correct james bond in our future. The last one was horrible. Who wants to see james bond, first of all, i dont want to give spoilers to our listeners, but you do not really want to see james bond and. Nor do you really want to see james bond as a family guy. I do not think. So i do not think that is true to character. That is interesting. I think they married him as married off and the audience did not like him in one of them. I thought they killed his wife pretty soon, thereafter. Well, they did. Apparently the audience approved of that, as well. Exactly. Okay. , no, go ahead. So you put out a book in which were trying to explain the history of espionage. You are trying to lay out clearly where people should go to separate facts from fiction. I think it is hard,. Bill i think it is one of the reasons why i wrote this. Buck i felt there really were not many places to turn. And one of the things that i really tried to do in this book, which was hard, was to provide a balanced view of very controversial issues. We have talked about warrantless wiretapping. And interrogation techniques. I think it is very hard to find places that will give you the most compelling arguments on both sides of the story. And so, i took great pains to try and do that in this book. Because, this is a textbook for undergraduates. I am teaching a class based on this book at stanford in this spring. I want my students to read both sides of the interrogation debate. I want them to have to grapple with the evidence that each side brings to bear for its side of the story. I do not think we get that in these places. If i had to answer your question, if i had to suggest where else people should turn to understand intelligence, i would encourage people to look at the annual intelligence threat assessment. It happens around february or march of every year. The head of the Intelligence Community actually lays out the best classified assessments about dangers confronting the country. And, it is right there on google and you can google the threat assessment every year and i think they are really insightful documents that shed a lot of light on how the Intelligence Community is thinking. Is your class unique in america in terms of teaching kids about this in america . Two other schools go down this road . It is all too rare. One of the things i did is look at how many of the top 25 universities ranked by u. S. News offer any courses on intelligence. The answer is less than half. In fact, i found more universities offer information on the history of rock and roll than intelligence. I say, it gives them a better chance of learning about you to the bans than the spy plane. We have an intelligence crisis in this country. One of the things im doing with this class is developing all sorts of materials, including simulations, that are going to be made available to anyone who wants to teach a class on intelligence. We can do a better job educating the next generation. If i test you with creating a rush more of attendance in america, four fingers can grow up on the side of the mountain saying, this is the story of american intelligence, who would you put up there . Well, first, i would have to put George Washington, no question. He was an avid spy master. And, he was better at intelligence, actually, then waging warfare on the battlefield. So, washington would certainly be up there. Second, it is a good question. I would probably put, and this may be an unusual choice, but i would put a russian who betrayed the soviet union to helped the United States. His name was dimitri. His code name was top hat. His information was so important and he did not do it for the money. He did it because he believed in america. His information was so important to cia officials they described it as christmas every time some of his information came. He was betrayed by a cia mole named paul drink james and was executed. I would probably put him up there as someone who courageously served the right side of history. So i have George Washington and top hat in there. I would say frank church. He is the head of the Church Committee in congress in the 1970s. A senator from idaho . He conducted the most serious sweeping investigations in history. It revealed some of the darker days of our Intelligence Community spying on americans, assassination plots. You mentioned exploding cigars. Assassination tends to get put on castro. As a result of that committee, we have the oversight regime, today. That has really helped, i think, with u. S. Intelligence. Both in terms of garnering trust and curbing access. And so, i would put frank church up there. And then i would say george h. W. Bush. We mentioned one of the only president s who served as cia directors. Really, understanding the Intelligence Community. And supporting it at a very challenging time as the cold war was ending. Very interesting. Good choices. Final question for you, amy. Your costs next spring. Lets say you do what all professors aspire to and inspire your students. One student said that professor amy zegart, they are so into espionage, and what should they do . First, i would ask that student, what kind of espionage . Do you want to analyze intelligence . Do you want to go out and convince people to spy on behalf of the United States . Those are two very different paths. Proamerican espionage or antiamerican espionage . Which side are you on . Right. But very different skill. Such very different personality types. Very different pass. And if they do want to do it, i would encourage them to apply to the Central Intelligence agency or other intelligence agencies. There is no more important time for intelligence than today and i would also encourage the student, you know, a students today do not want to be lifers, they do not want to spend 25 years and one career. I would start in the Intelligence Community and move on to other careers and serve your country in other ways. It is awfully hard to start in a different career and then move into the Intelligence Community. And so, start where you can. I would say start by serving in the government. That is interesting. The washington socalled bandits check out the military after 20 years. And they go into government related work. If i am checking out the cia after 20 years what Transferable Skills do i have in the private sector . One of the things that is interesting is you have to get your resume approved before you leave. So, you may not even be able to say what Transferable Skills you have. That is a challenge. Forgetting a job once you leave. I would say if you are on the analytical side the Transferable Skills you have are analyzing really difficult problems. That is the Critical Thinking that wed like to teach undergraduates at stanford. We like to teach graduate students and cia analysts get that in spades. So, i think those are incredible Transferable Skills. Working with people, you have to work with other people. Intelligence is not a long range enterprise. You have to put your Heads Together with others and deal with this which i think we know usually provides better outcome whether you are in business or in the government. Those are three really important skill sets that i think analysts inside the agency get. , final question, amy, if we can get people to read the book, and i can get you quality face time with the president , what would you tell him about intelligence . What improvements would you suggest . If i could say one thing to the president it is that this is a moment that requires transformational change in the Intelligence Community. Business as usual is going to set the United States back by generations. This is a moment of technological change unlike anything we have experienced. We have never had so many pathbreaking technologies converging at the same time. Ai, the internet, commercial satellites, quantum computing, synthetic biology, just to name a few. It is an adapt or fail moment for the Intelligence Community and the adaptation required means harnessing open Source Information and getting out and only being in the secret business to the extent that the community has. Are you an optimist or a pessimist . Do you think the government gets this . I am, at heart, and optimist. I think many people in the government get it. My question is, how do we get from here to there . How do we do it fast enough to make a difference . By seeing Real Movement on a adopting new technologies inside the Intelligence Community. But, we have to run faster. I am optimistic and impatient for change. Okay, speaking of optimistic, you have a great book tour handling this. I hope covid does not for a roughly on the book trail. I hope you get to do a lot of events and sell a lot of books. Thank you so much. Amy, thank you again for joining us. For the book, club thank you for everyone on behalf of the hoover institution. The title of the book is spies, lies, and algorithms. The history of intelligence. If you want to follow amy on twitter her total handle is at eight amy zegart you can sign up for the hoover daily report which will deliver the best to your inbox every weekday. It is very simple to do that, just go to our website and where its daily subscribes. Every time she read something there you are. Again, it is right there in front of you. Weekends on cspan two are an intellectual feast. 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