Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. I'm as
Speaker 1: Volosen here with Cara Price. Hi as Hi Cara. So
Speaker 1: I've been very, very excited about today's story. It's a
Speaker 1: deep dive with the author of a column that has
Speaker 1: the headline A band of innovators reimagines the spy game
Speaker 1: for a world with no cover. Here's the author.
Speaker 2: It began to realize that the future of intelligence was
Speaker 2: going to be written in zeros and ones, that it
Speaker 2: was going to become a technology war an algorithm.
Speaker 1: So the story is by David Ignatius. He's a journalist
Speaker 1: at the Washington Post with the reputation of knowing the
Speaker 1: inside workings of the CIA better than almost anyone else
Speaker 1: in the world. One of the things I love about
Speaker 1: doing tech stuff is that we get to look under
Speaker 1: the hood of how tech is revolutionizing places that you
Speaker 1: might not expect, in some cases the most unexpected places,
Speaker 1: one of which is, as we insiders like to call it,
Speaker 1: the agency, the CIA. And what's interesting about David's piece
Speaker 1: is that it's clear spycraft itself. Is it an inflection
Speaker 1: point because of AI?
Speaker 3: So tell me a little bit more about why this
Speaker 3: cut your interest.
Speaker 1: Well, I grew up as a boy in Britain and
Speaker 1: have become a British Man. So of course James Bond
Speaker 1: fantasies are totally organic to who I became as a person.
Speaker 1: But I'm just beyond intrigued by this conceptually, because traditional
Speaker 1: spycraft was all about obscuring your identity from other people.
Speaker 1: Like all those crazy disguises and prosthetics and stuff you
Speaker 1: see in movies like Mitchell Impossible, They're all based on
Speaker 1: real CIA technologies, or at least many of them are.
Speaker 1: And David told me that the art of disguise has
Speaker 1: gotten so good that you can easily change your race,
Speaker 1: even your gender. And that's just the stuff we know about.
Speaker 1: But now intelligence agencies are facing a radical new problem,
Speaker 1: which is how do you trig a machine?
Speaker 3: So while you might have a mask that completely changes
Speaker 3: your appearance, a retina scan or a fingerprint could completely
Speaker 3: blow your cover.
Speaker 1: That's right. So the story began with a guy who
Speaker 1: worked with the CIA who warned a few years ago
Speaker 1: that computer vision would soon be able to identify people
Speaker 1: at a far off distance just based on the signature
Speaker 1: of how they walked. It's called gate analysis, and at
Speaker 1: the time he was laughed out of the room as
Speaker 1: a scaremonger, but it turns out he'd actually seen into
Speaker 1: the future. It's almost impossible nowadays for humans through outsmart
Speaker 1: machines because of something that David called, and I love
Speaker 1: this phrase, digital dust. What that refers to is the
Speaker 1: data signatures we leave behind no matter how hard we try.
Speaker 1: Here's the real kicker. Not leaving digital dust could be
Speaker 1: just as revealing as leaving it. In the past, spies
Speaker 1: could slip under cover with just a story. But now
Speaker 1: if they don't have decades of online activity LinkedIn Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Speaker 1: To support that story, it just doesn't make any sense
Speaker 1: to their adversaries. In fact, as David put it, the
Speaker 1: harder you try to hide, the more visible you become.
Speaker 1: And all of this leads to some existential questions about
Speaker 1: the future of spying. How does a CIA adapt, what
Speaker 1: happens if it doesn't, and who's responsible for dragging into
Speaker 1: the future. One of those people is the guy I mentioned,
Speaker 1: the person who warned about data analysis. He's now innovating
Speaker 1: on the outside and trying to set into the CIA.
Speaker 1: But to start with, I wanted to know about how
Speaker 1: the CIA has tried to adapt already and how it's going.
Speaker 1: Here's my conversation with David Ignatius. You chart in the
Speaker 1: piece how a number of poorly executed technological ideas have
Speaker 1: led to networks being dismantled in places like China and Iran.
Speaker 1: I assume by networks being dismantled that means people getting
Speaker 1: arrested and maybe even killed, and that only killed.
Speaker 2: Some of the executions were ruesomely done in ways to
Speaker 2: make sure that our overhead satellites can see them. So
Speaker 2: it is true that our attempts to come up with
Speaker 2: clever technologies have sometimes been half baked. I'll give you
Speaker 2: an example that's been published by me and others. The
Speaker 2: agency had a seemingly very clever method for communicating with
Speaker 2: recruited agents, where it would give them access to computer
Speaker 2: websites that fit their personalities. Let's suppose somebody was a
Speaker 2: Liverpool soccer fan, so it'll be a Liverpool fan site.
Speaker 2: But embedded in that fan site was a template for
Speaker 2: communicating directly and very secretly through the Internet through a VPN,
Speaker 2: a hole in the Internet back to Langley. The problem
Speaker 2: was that these things all had the same back end electronically,
Speaker 2: so once you stripped away the nominal cover. You know,
Speaker 2: there were ones for Rasta fans in the West Indies,
Speaker 2: there were ones for Cut three music fans. I mean,
Speaker 2: if you can go to dozens of the dedicated sites,
Speaker 2: but they all had the same back end, which was
Speaker 2: really about covert communications. And in both Iran and China
Speaker 2: this secret was assessed and then ruthlessly exploited. So you
Speaker 2: have to be careful with technology. When you think you're
Speaker 2: being smart, you have to go back and look at
Speaker 2: it again because you may simply be being obvious in
Speaker 2: a different way you hadn't considered.
Speaker 1: One of the other examples that comes up in the
Speaker 1: piece is American Kamando's I believe in Syria who whose
Speaker 1: cell phones came from Fort Bragg, right, And so it
Speaker 1: was very easy for an external pologies to locate where
Speaker 1: they were.
Speaker 2: So there was a very secret location in northeastern Syria,
Speaker 2: in the Kurdish controlled area. I know about it because
Speaker 2: I probably went there five times as an embed with
Speaker 2: the Joint Special Operations Command, which is our most secret
Speaker 2: and really our best military force, which is running operations
Speaker 2: there to destroy Isis. Remember how frightening ISIS was so
Speaker 2: a well meaning guy who was in the commercial advertising business,
Speaker 2: whose business was picking up the little emissions from your
Speaker 2: cell phones that tell ways where you are on the highway,
Speaker 2: what cop car has pulled over. He wanted to help
Speaker 2: refugees who were fleeing Syria those early in the early
Speaker 2: days of the world. So I just bought from Syria
Speaker 2: telcom companies bought all this data. Is very cheap because
Speaker 2: nobody had any commercial applications whatsoever for that area. And
Speaker 2: then he overlaid telephones in the area of Fort Bragg,
Speaker 2: North Carolina, which is where Jaysack and all of our
Speaker 2: most secret units operate, and he found there were all
Speaker 2: these things at the cement factory, supposedly an abandoned French
Speaker 2: cement factory. The advertisers just were like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: look at all this. So there's an example where commercial
Speaker 2: innovation just was much faster than the creativity or the
Speaker 2: ability to detect new threats and opportunities on the intelligence side.
Speaker 2: And that illustrates I think what in some ways OZ
Speaker 2: is that is the biggest and most positive change that's happened.
Speaker 2: Starting in nineteen ninety nine, then CI director George Tenne
Speaker 2: was very foresighted and seeing that the CIA is falling
Speaker 2: behind the pace of innovation of Silicon Valley. Tenant had
Speaker 2: a good sense to create a CIA venture capital fund,
Speaker 2: which he called ink Tel, and rather than getting the
Speaker 2: usual Intel bureaucrat to run it, he went outside and
Speaker 2: picked him in named Gilman Louie, who'd been running a
Speaker 2: video game company, and Gilman Louie began going out and
Speaker 2: looking for smart ideas that could help in intelligence missions,
Speaker 2: recognizing that the pace of innovation in the private sectors
Speaker 2: simply couldn't be matched by government. The government had to
Speaker 2: find a way to use these technologies, if possible, work
Speaker 2: with the people who were creating them. So that got
Speaker 2: the intelligence communitee operating at the speed of innovation, if
Speaker 2: you will, and I think has certainly accelerated the pace
Speaker 2: of change that's happened in Britain a lot of our allies.
Speaker 2: So this began with a good idea of George Tennant's.
Speaker 2: But now I think pretty much universally understood that the
Speaker 2: intelligence world wants totally closed, has to connect with this
Speaker 2: wildly open and innovative world of talking about.
Speaker 1: I saw in your piece those investments in Paneteer and Enderrail,
Speaker 1: and presumably if you were a venture investor, you would
Speaker 1: be beyond cockahoop with those returns. As the CIA, though
Speaker 1: I mean financial performances is great, but as a CIA
Speaker 1: in some sense threatening its own relevance by outsourcing so
Speaker 1: much innovation.
Speaker 2: As the private sector, the CIA, they're trying to keep up.
Speaker 2: They have technical advisory boards and they has some very
Speaker 2: patriotic people and in tech companies work with them. We
Speaker 2: have this interesting problem that Elon Musk, to take one example,
Speaker 2: came up with an extraordinarily powerful system Starlink with now
Speaker 2: three thousand dollars satellites and lowerthorbit providing broadbeam signals over everywhere,
Speaker 2: and that became the command and control network for the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian military. But that then puts enormous power in the
Speaker 2: hands of a private sector entrepreneurs. So what happens if
Speaker 2: Eli Musk decides I have to sell teslas in China,
Speaker 2: I have to make teslas and shine. I don't want to.
Speaker 2: I'm sick of this. Ukraine will war, right, So I'm
Speaker 2: going to cut off their ability to get those signals.
Speaker 2: There have been moments when he's in fact threatened to
Speaker 2: do that and then just pulled back. But it just
Speaker 2: illustrates that the use of private technology is a double
Speaker 2: edged sword. Yes, it accelerates the pace of your ability
Speaker 2: to innovate, but it makes you more dependent on these
Speaker 2: entrepreneurs who hopefully share your national interests and will protect
Speaker 2: and advance your secret advantage. But you can't be sure
Speaker 2: of that, and so that's a puzzle. I think people
Speaker 2: are still struggling with.
Speaker 1: Characterize where the CIA is on these issues and questions
Speaker 1: that you've been raising, because the sense I get from
Speaker 1: the piece is that you feel their way behind. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's this great quote from a former CIA director, David Norman,
Speaker 1: who says, if Henry Ford had gone to transportation customers
Speaker 1: and us what they wanted, the would have said faster horses.
Speaker 1: That's what the CIA has been trying to build, faster horses,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty damning.
Speaker 2: It is pretty damning. So they deny that they're as
Speaker 2: out of it as a piece suggests. The question is
Speaker 2: how fast you can move to fully adapt It can
Speaker 2: be aware of something, but fully adapt to it. As
Speaker 2: a different matter, people are still trying to I think
Speaker 2: faster or worse. It is a little unfair, but they're
Speaker 2: still trying to think about within the existing paradigm for espionage.
Speaker 2: How can we do it better? How do we hide better?
Speaker 2: How do we find ways to capture their signals without
Speaker 2: being observed ourselves? But what's needed, people say, is something
Speaker 2: really very new, a whole new way of thinking about operating.
Speaker 2: Is John Ratcliffe, the CI director of a person who's creative,
Speaker 2: disruptive enough to orchestrate that transformation. We'll see, But legacy
Speaker 2: systems have a momentum sort of weight that Look at
Speaker 2: aircraft carriers in the Navy. I mean, it's twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: We knew that they were all vulnerable. They disappeared the
Speaker 2: first minutes or hours of any attack. But they're still
Speaker 2: out there, and good luck trying to get rid of.
Speaker 1: Them after the break the story, even elite soldier to
Speaker 1: tech founder who's creating an AI souperagent, stay with us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this's light in the p The CIA's technology challenge is
Speaker 1: a little noted example of a transformation that's happening in
Speaker 1: every area of defense and security today. Smart machines can
Speaker 1: outweit humans now, even for Tim Cook, even for the
Speaker 1: CEOs of silicon value based technology companies, knowing how to
Speaker 1: balance defending the core product with integrating this wave of
Speaker 1: new technology that is so fast moving. Even Google is
Speaker 1: struggling with it. How does a government organization saddled with
Speaker 1: the bureaucracy that even the most forward thinking government organizations
Speaker 1: come with. Is there an overall strategic response to this problem?
Speaker 1: Is crisis?
Speaker 2: So I think the obvious answer is that new ideas
Speaker 2: in the intelligence business that are really powerful, that allow
Speaker 2: you to collect secrets that you didn't have before, that
Speaker 2: open new areas for collection and analysis become irresistible. These
Speaker 2: secrets are so powerful once you learn to read somebody's mail,
Speaker 2: listening to their phone calls, it's resistible. Because policymakers, once
Speaker 2: they've got that conversation between the General secretary and his
Speaker 2: chief of staff, they want it. They want to get
Speaker 2: the good stuff. So there's always a demand for policy
Speaker 2: makers for the very best intelligence. And if technology can
Speaker 2: allow people to get more of that or sustain the
Speaker 2: flow of it, certainly the demand will be there. I
Speaker 2: just wouldn't note if you look at what the CIA
Speaker 2: and other agencies were able to know about Russian intentions
Speaker 2: in late twenty twenty one, when Europe and even Ukraine
Speaker 2: said no, the Russians aren't going to attack, and Bill
Speaker 2: Burns and his colleagues kept going out and saying, yes
Speaker 2: they are, and that they had detailed intelligence. They were
Speaker 2: reading Russian intentions like a phone book. It's still not
Speaker 2: clear just how they had such precise intelligence, but they
Speaker 2: knew right where they were coming out. How Ukraine in
Speaker 2: the early days of the war was able to be
Speaker 2: so successful. We knew where they were coming. They were
Speaker 2: coming to the airport just west of Kiev. We knew
Speaker 2: exactly what they were going to try to do and
Speaker 2: ban there were people there waiting for them, and they
Speaker 2: just took them out. But the electronic coordination of all
Speaker 2: the systems that have to have to operate simultaneously we
Speaker 2: don't think about. You know, if you've got an hour
Speaker 2: of time and you've got all these different multiple fires,
Speaker 2: different drones, different systems that cannot be done by human beings,
Speaker 2: too complicated. So there's a way in which the war
Speaker 2: in Ukraine was an algorithm and the complex systems for
Speaker 2: handling data that's never been done in the warfare before.
Speaker 2: That is something of that complexity managed electronically simultaneously. You've
Speaker 2: never seen that before.
Speaker 1: So the diagnosis is actually rumors of the demise maybe
Speaker 1: over exaggerating. What you're really looking at in the piece
Speaker 1: is more continued relevance in a five to ten year horizon.
Speaker 2: So I'm looking at the people who were trying to
Speaker 2: change the paradigm. But the point that should encourage people,
Speaker 2: if you're an American, you have to say that is
Speaker 2: there are a lot of really smart people out there.
Speaker 2: Many of them got frustrated being the CI. It's pretty
Speaker 2: bureaucratic these days, got a little political, to put a
Speaker 2: mild late so people say. And they're out there trying
Speaker 2: to create companies that are going to be good for
Speaker 2: their former colleagues, solve problems that they couldn't solve while
Speaker 2: they were in an operation, and so people are coming
Speaker 2: up with, as I say, quite innovative ideas.
Speaker 1: Talk a bit about Aaron Brown's story, if you don't mind,
Speaker 1: how you first met him, how his insights within the
Speaker 1: agency were rejected, and how he came to design Lumbra
Speaker 1: and even engage with Samiltman in the very early days
Speaker 1: of chat Chipet's release.
Speaker 2: Brown was an Army ranger and if you don't know
Speaker 2: anything about what they do at ranger school, you know
Speaker 2: these are the guys who can climb up a cliff
Speaker 2: face and run ten miles or a fifty pound pack
Speaker 2: on their back and get in and out of incredible places.
Speaker 2: They're tough fighters and end up going to these special units,
Speaker 2: And like many very good soldiers, Aaron ended up getting
Speaker 2: cut to the CI and worked in its counter terrorism
Speaker 2: operations in the days of the pursuit of wassamb B
Speaker 2: and Laud. All the while he was with a deep
Speaker 2: engineer's interest in electronics, was trying to think about the
Speaker 2: tools of his craft and whether they were adequate. And
Speaker 2: when the bin laden work was done, he began to
Speaker 2: worry about the vulnerability of officers overseas to this technology
Speaker 2: that could recognize the way they walked. And just think
Speaker 2: about it. If you've got recordings of everybody enters all
Speaker 2: the airports of China, everybody who enters the US embassy,
Speaker 2: or all the consulates that we have, you could end
Speaker 2: up having a library that you can then run against
Speaker 2: people all over China. You see, well, where that guy
Speaker 2: from the US embassy, what's he doing in chung Du?
Speaker 2: Why do you go to that forest that's ten miles
Speaker 2: out of town. What's going on here? So he left
Speaker 2: the agency year eighteen months ago and with a friend
Speaker 2: started this company, Lumbra, And his basic idea is that
Speaker 2: it's not simply these magnificent ais that are moving towards
Speaker 2: what we call superintelligence without being quite sure what that means.
Speaker 2: But computers that begin to be able to think in
Speaker 2: real human like ways and begin to give themselves instructions,
Speaker 2: maybe by writing their own programs, begin to be able
Speaker 2: to speak to each other. It's one thing super intelligence
Speaker 2: will be able to do. And his insight was that
Speaker 2: just as our brilliant brains need hands, legs, the ability
Speaker 2: to get to what we need to assemble to then process,
Speaker 2: computers are going to need agents agentic AI that will
Speaker 2: help them assemble that disparate pieces of information, think and
Speaker 2: then analyze and make sense of it. No human being could.
Speaker 2: So he decided that that was his going to be
Speaker 2: his area, this central nervous system that's going to connect
Speaker 2: the AI brain with all the other parts of the
Speaker 2: system that will make it most effective. He in turn
Speaker 2: introduced me to other friends, a guy who was thinking
Speaker 2: about this problem of how our cell phones give off
Speaker 2: our identity, but we still have to communicate, So how
Speaker 2: our officers going to communicate without giving away their position.
Speaker 2: And it turns out he came up with an incredibly
Speaker 2: ingenious technology that essentially the three or four levels of
Speaker 2: identifiers in our phones were not aware of that give
Speaker 2: off our identification, but kind a way to bounce those
Speaker 2: identifiers among the different a thousands of users of his system,
Speaker 2: so you can't really tell where any particular signal is
Speaker 2: coming from, even if you capture it. It's called Cape.
Speaker 2: Third company that interesting to me was called Strider. It's
Speaker 2: based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Essentially, what they're doing
Speaker 2: is reading other people's digital dust. We're not the only
Speaker 2: ones who leave digital dust. The Chinese are so intent
Speaker 2: on monitoring their own population. They've got cameras on every
Speaker 2: street and it's not to watch us, is to watch
Speaker 2: Chinese people. And it turns out that that's an entry
Speaker 2: way for companies like Strider to collect an amazing amount
Speaker 2: of information. I mean, I've looked at it what they
Speaker 2: can get, and it's it's pretty incredible. Imagine how long
Speaker 2: it would take you to do that kind of forensics
Speaker 2: in a free digital world. So that's something that that
Speaker 2: company is doing. They think they probably do it better
Speaker 2: than any internal agency in the government. The fact that
Speaker 2: they were willing to talk about it with me in detail,
Speaker 2: I didn't sneak them in the telling me, it means
Speaker 2: that they're fairly confident they can continue to do it.
Speaker 2: So those are three little examples of companies that are
Speaker 2: playing around at the frontier, and I hope people will
Speaker 2: find that encouraging. I would hate to think that we
Speaker 2: were just a slumbering, sloppy giant with the intelligence equivalent
Speaker 2: of aircraft carriers just sitting there away and get blown
Speaker 2: out of the water. I don't want that.
Speaker 1: We've talked a lot about concerns about the CIA falling
Speaker 1: behind technologically. Do you have any concerns about a swing
Speaker 1: too hot in the other direction and onboarding too many
Speaker 1: untested private technologies that could create risk either to American
Speaker 1: citizens or systems risk. I mean, what's the kind of
Speaker 1: flip side concern and everything we've been talking about.
Speaker 2: So, you know, this is a period where we're seeing
Speaker 2: that the powers of government can be misused in what
Speaker 2: to me are quite disturbing. When is you know, when
Speaker 2: law enforcement is federalized, you see overreach, and you could
Speaker 2: see a technological version of that overreach. You could see
Speaker 2: the application of facial recognition software. In China, a citizens
Speaker 2: can't go out of his town without permission. He gets
Speaker 2: a score based on his performance at work, rating his
Speaker 2: social merit. He gets a little gold star if he's
Speaker 2: a dutiful citizens supporting the Chinese Communist Party. We don't
Speaker 2: want that, and we don't want our schools, I don't
Speaker 2: think to become rigid in what they instruct We want creativity,
Speaker 2: not uniformity, and these tools can create uniformity sadly. So
Speaker 2: you know, we have to remember that the power of
Speaker 2: our federal government is overwhelming and that we want it
Speaker 2: to be strong in dealing with our adversaries. But if
Speaker 2: that power begins to be used against American citizens or
Speaker 2: inappropriate ways around the world, everybody should be watching. So
Speaker 2: that's I think my biggest challenge is a journalist. I
Speaker 2: think this revolution is needed and beneficial, but I think
Speaker 2: the dangers are ones that we have to keep in mind.
Speaker 2: It can't be so worried about the danger you just
Speaker 2: to stop and say we're not going to do it.
Speaker 2: That would be a mistake. But you do have to
Speaker 2: be eventualan all the time about what could happen.
Speaker 1: Well, David Nations, thank you so much for joining us
Speaker 1: on text us today for a fascinating conversation, and I
Speaker 1: hope you'll join us again before too long.
Speaker 2: With pleasure Us. Thank you very much for.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff. I amost Forelosian and I'm care Price. This
Speaker 1: episode was Preduce Spy, Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill.
Speaker 1: It was executive produced by Me, Karen Price, and Kate
Speaker 1: Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack
Speaker 1: Insley makes this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.
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