Hoover book club where we bring hoover fellows and friends together to discuss their latest writings our guest today is amy ziegart. Shes the Morris Arnold and notaging cox senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution and professor of Political Science by courtesy at stanford university. Shes also a senior fellow at stanford stream of spoly institute for the National Studies chair of staffords Artificial Intelligence and International SecuritySteering Committee and a contributing writer at the atlantic but wait, theres more abc a guards also a book author her latest title being spies lives and algorithms the history and future of american intelligence. Amy great to see you and congratulations on the book great to see youtube bill. Thanks. Its always nice to your book rather than just be writing a book and that leads to my first question. I just listed countless things youre doing in and around the stanford world. How do you find time to write a book . Well because we couldnt get together and we couldnt travel so i am moved all my books to my home office and hold up and thats how i was able to. Finish it took a lot of you know structured time away from the office to get it done and just a lot of discipline, i guess and just kind of keeping atticus. Its like i deal in collaborating but im writing and you know 800 word bursts here and there but a book is a is a different creature. Well, i cant do what you do. I im afraid of writing on deadline to be honest. So if i have a deadline that several years away i can get it done. But if its you know several hours away, thats another story stick to what you do. What you do is thoughtful youre not living in the moment. So well done. So lets talk about the book spas lies algorithms. Lets break it down into categories. Amy spies. What are we talking about . We talk spies these days. Well the let me take a step back because the purpose of the book really is to inform a general audience about what the secret world of intelligence is spies usually get peoples attention and i think there are a lot of myths about what spine is even the basic terminology we call someone a spy when theyre not really a spy. The spy is the foreigner that bet. Their country for our cause right not the cia officer that actually is running them. I think you know that one of the main points of writing the book is to dispel some myths right, so ill give you like my top three myths of Good Community myth number one, is that intelligence is secrets, right . Most of intelligence actually is not secrets, right 80 of a typical report is open Source Information, right . Myth number two intelligence is policy, right . That spies are out there giving policy advice, right mr. President. You should do x y or z. They dont theyre not supposed to do that. They usually do and i think the third, you know sort of big myth is covert action is this bag of dirty tricks that we reserve for the you know, the most horrible things that our government does and thats not true either we do everything overtly that we do covertly what makes something covert. Is that the Us Government tries to its official responsibility for it. So whos our covert action wars are over action to replace regime. So we do everything overtly that we do covertly right so it comes to my name is this documentary . Its up right now and oliver stone in the movie jfk which justice celebrity anniversary and it gets the two things number one how stone made the movie but secondly, its oliver stone opening his head and revealing what he thinks about the Jfk Assassination and vietnam and intelligence. So before you know, youre on a very dark road or what the Us Government does and doesnt gun and now were living the days of the cia and cuba and trying to feed, you know fidel castro poison cigars and things like that. And so thats what youre getting out there. Just the public is being fed a lot of information. Thats maybe not quite accurate. Yeah, and what we see bill is you know in in Public Opinion polling is this dramatically rising belief conspiracy theories of all types. So one of the most stunning polling results i found was that even if you years ago, 25 of americans believe 9 11 was an inside job by the Us Government a quarter of americans believe that so a lot of what im trying to do is dispel these, you know crazy conspiracy notions about what the Intelligence Community is really doing right, but that also leads in a technology. Well get that no second. I mean you take that poll of a quarter of american snake that 9 11 was an inside job. I think the Actor Charlie Sheen was a big proponent of that theory. Im not sure what paul say about people thinking about vaccines these days, but im sure theres a healthy portion of population who thinks of vaccines. Is this for one thing thats allowed bill gates to microchip you so, you know, so i dont know if its technology is driving this per se or maybe its the medium pop culture amy, but this is what i think youre getting at at your book. Its just its a lot of a lot of what the government does and doesnt do on intelligence is sort of polluted by what pop culture gives us what academia teaches us. Yes, so what its its im glad you raised that bill because what originally got me interested 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 just 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 spy themed entertainment or at least there were correlations those who said they always watch the show 24 for example with jack bauer were far more willing to advocate really aggressive intelligence policies like waterboarding for example, right . And so 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 about this and National Polls and actually in the policy world. Okay, so the book you talk about espionage going back to the days of George Washington. So it seems as government has shall i say a rich tradition of being involved in espionage, but very simple question amy, how does espionage differ today versus it did back in the days the Founding Fathers . Oh, thats such a good question in some ways. Its really similar more similar than we might think so. We think about Information Warfare as an internet invention, but in fact Benjamin Franklin was really good at Information Warfare cranked out fake news literally fake news articles from his paris basement. Its different today. Primarily. I would say in three ways. Number one is speed. Everythings 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 and when they need to know it, so everything is accelerating today. Thats a really hard challenge. I think for intelligence agencies, right . The second is scale. So if we think about i have a chapter in the book about traders and counterintelligence, you know, it used to take years for people to smuggle documents out in their pants and garbage bags and all sorts of crazy ways to to try to betray their country, right but now traders can download documents millions of documents in a matter of minutes or hours or months. So this scale of espionage and particularly counterintelligence challenges is completely different and i see the third key difference with espionage today is that theres been a democratization of capability. It used to be that that superpowers like the United States had a really advantage in espionage right only the government, really and maybe the soviet union could launch billion dollar satellites and have massive capabilities of code breaking and code making well now anyone can gather that kind of data and anyone can analyze that kind of data ai capabilities are available on the internet. They dont require a degree in Computer Science. We have satellite imagery. We can all you know, if you have an act if you have access to the internet you have access to google earth, so there are and and events are live tweeted right so we can track things on twitter. So now we have to think about intelligence competitors today being much more spread out and its a much more crowded Playing Field for Us Intelligence agencies. Okay. So who are the competitors . Well, the main competitors are of course nation states, but anybody can do this now. So if we think about on the good guy side of things right and think about Nuclear Threats, there are all sorts of people outside the Us Government that are tracking Nuclear Threats and theyre doing a really good job. Some of them are colleagues at stanford, right, but you know in the in the past year for example news came to light about these hundreds of Chinese Nuclear missile silos that were previously unknown. Well that came to life because of people without security clearances without access to classified information just using commercial satellite imagery and their expertise and posting it online. So people who look at google earth shots of Chinese Naval yards and north Korean Missile sites and whatnot and then say look something looks bad. But why are they doing this amy . Why isnt the Us Government or is the Us Government doing this . We just dont know about it. You mean to do is government tracking these things or is the Us Government working with these people right . A little scary to think that some individ. Not a vigilante but individual amy is looking at google earth and then reporting that look at these chinese ships being built in the naval yard, and the thought is does Us Government notice on id like to think the Us Government has step ahead of that of that individual. So the Us Government is aware of whats going on and i would say and in many cases partnering with Nongovernmental Nuclear sleuths as i roll them, right . So there are partnerships some are more formalized and others, but you put your finger on a key point bill, 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 . Its open anyone can join this world, and weve already had instances where so we say less benign actors or nefarious actors are deliberately trying to inject falsehoods into this ecosystem in the hosts at the Us Government will fall for it. So its going to get more complicated will be bad actors and or of them in this ecosystem in the future and the governments aware of it and trying to figure out ways to engage more productively with this nongovernmental ecosystem. Right . Lets talk about the Us Government intelligence apparatus amy. I was watching the Army Navy Football game this weekend and during the Third Quarter commercial came up in the commercial was trying to get you to join the army to get involved in counterintelligence to stop hackers and then it shown on the tagline. It showed all the branches of the Armed Services including space force. That caught me to thinking who drives the train these days. Is it is it the military is it the nsa is that the cia is in honolin security we seem to have a lot of entities devoted these days to the great umbrella of intelligence and counterintelligence. Well, the unsatisfying answer who drives the train today. Is it depends . Okay, so we have 18 different agencies in the us Intelligence Community today that number often stuns people 18 agencies. We hear about the cia maybe the nsa but theyre a lots right and thats much higher than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So whenever we have a crisis the tendency is lets create a new agency for that and the result is its really hard to coordinate them all so nominally in charge of this behemoth community is the director of National Intelligence thats getting better, but the dni has only limited control over budgets and people and as you know in washington, those are two very powerful lovers if you cant control the budget and you cant control the people youre in the business of trying to persuade and joel right not direct and command and so its a work in progress how this Community Works together. And do you think the 18 need to be folded into a dozen or six or would you would you downsize that or would you would you create a super agency to walk over 18 . Well, would you streamline this . Well streamlining is hard, but you know, i people arm wrestle over this all the time, right or do we have too many do we not have enough the benefit i give you the the argument on one side, which is that the reason we have so many agencies is they provide tailored capabilities, right . So the navy has different intelligence needs than the army and so the navy should have its own Intelligence Unit to help it with its intelligence priorities theres real truth to that and different agencies have different specialties. So cia is human intelligence, right National Security agency is signals intelligence. So email phone calls, right and specialization is has benefits. So i always give the example of doctors, right . No one questions whether doctors should be specialized. You dont want your heart surgeon detecting skin cancer. You dont want your dermatologist operating on your heart. So specialization has benefits the challenge though is how do you harness that specialization . So, you know what everyone knows thats challenge and thats where emboldening and powering the dni which has happened over time has paid some real dividends, but its still its still a challenge. It is a challenge maybe getting the agencies to talk to each other. It wasnt this one of the takeaways from 9 11 that digest the is just not a crosschatter with them washington about what intelligence we had. Yes, and that cross chatter communication is much better than it used to be which is not saying a whole lot right because the bar was low before nine eleven, right, but it is getting better. I have a heretical idea which ive had a lot of peoples or arguing with me about which is what we actually really need most is a 19th Intelligence Agency and i say that with some trepidation because of the coordination challenges we just talked about right the 19th agency would be dedicated entirely to open Source Intelligence stuff thats publicly available out there on the internet because whats happened in our in with this american, you know, were talking. Out technology because of the advent of new technologies right the whole intelligence battleground has changed right . It used to be that secrets were more of a key secret still matter, but now insights coming from harnessing lots of openly available data and secrets will always be primary in secret agencies. So no no existing agency is giving Public Information the attention that it deserves and youre not going to get that unless you get a new agency trying to harness the internet to be saying it sounds a little bit like drinking from a fire hydrant in terms of collecting information. So how would you actually physically what you just have an army of pardon me nerds and pajamas and basements around world going through going through and how would you how would you actually attack the unit at that way . Well, a lot of it can be you know, how can Technology Help us with technology . Yes, how can things like ai tools augment the human analysts, right . We have just far too much data for anybody to process at any one time. To give you some idea, you know the amount of data is estimated on earth to double every 24 months, right . Thats an astounding level of data. But algorithms can help make sense of that data, right . So ill give you a concrete example that happened actually at stanford within the past year. So i have two colleagues who wanted to better understand trade between north korea and china. And so what they decided you was look at the imagery of trucks crossing between the border between these two countries and lets go back several years. They thought and lets analyze the truck traffic between these just to get a sense of what can we derive from looking at this and so without any Computer Science training, they developed a Machine Learning algorithm so that the machine would automate the scanni