[SPEAKER_02]: M-S-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-A-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M-D-S-W-M [SPEAKER_01]: and welcome back to another edition of the Spide Talk podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a really special guest today, Aaron Brown, who spent 13 years in CIA operations, but his real thing these days is technology, the espionage technology, which has gone through a revolution thanks to AI and other techniques, and we'll be talking to him soon. [SPEAKER_01]: But we just want to touch you on some other weird things going on in our bar of the world. [SPEAKER_01]: We ran what's going to happen there? [SPEAKER_01]: Will you or won't you?
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know yet. [SPEAKER_01]: Venezuela, what's happening there that is far from the front pages now. [SPEAKER_01]: Greenlands, like ancient history. [SPEAKER_01]: There are talks going on with Ukraine and Russia while the war plods on these terrible erratax on civilians in Ukraine is something we've just addressed in the spike on news letter today, but closer to home, we have the director of national intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: interfering in election, what do we call this election review election, which on, uh, to coin its phrase, election security is how she refers to it, but take it away. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, well look, a lot of people in our spy talk world were startled last week. [SPEAKER_04]: when Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, showed up for the FBI search of Foulton County election records.
[SPEAKER_04]: So apparently an effort to vindicate President Trump's insistence that he actually won the 2020 election. [SPEAKER_04]: which of course he did not, but there was a lot of very strong reaction from Democrats on the Hill, Mark Warner, ranking on Democrat on Senate intelligence, James Times and others, demanding an explanation why was the director of national intelligence who was supposed to be focusing on foreign threats, participating in a domestic law enforcement operation.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Gabbert actually wrote a pretty revealing letter back to them this week. [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe revealing a little more than she might have intended, but going through it, I just want to highlight a couple of points. [SPEAKER_04]: First of all, she answered the question of why she was there. [SPEAKER_04]: She said quite explicitly, my presence was requested by the president, so Trump told her to go down. [SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it wasn't just her, she, we were learned from this letter that she also brought along officers and analysts from something called the National Counter Intelligence and Security Center, which is a unit within her office that focuses on counter intelligence. [SPEAKER_04]: She also revealed that she had dual-headed the Atlanta Special Agent in charge for the FBI [SPEAKER_04]: which means that the FBI agent Atlanta reports the har as well as cash per tell the FBI director.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, I, apparently, this is a program that has existed for a while. [SPEAKER_04]: I've never seen any public reference to it before, and certainly not in such a high profile case, totally alone. [SPEAKER_04]: We political, um, overtones.
[SPEAKER_04]: But the real, you know, question is, you know, she, the, the letter suggests all this was about election security and that there is far and threats to the election to our elections that presumably tainted the 2020 vote in Fulton County, the most important county, almost populous county in Georgia and instrumental in swinging the state for Biden rather than Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then she was ironic, how ironic because there was massive foreign interference in our elections in 2016 to help electron focused on There's nothing and go anyway. [SPEAKER_04]: Go ahead and reveal it But then in the last letter, it last page of the letter. [SPEAKER_04]: She says she points out that the search warrant [SPEAKER_04]: which was signed by a federal magistrate, was under seal.
[SPEAKER_04]: So then she writes, as such, I have not seen the warrant or the evidence of probable cause that the DOJ submitted to court for approval. [SPEAKER_04]: So does she know the basis for this search or not? [SPEAKER_04]: There she seems to be suggesting. [SPEAKER_04]: She actually does it. [SPEAKER_04]: So what do we make of all this talk about, far and threats and counterintelligence? [SPEAKER_00]: Really? [SPEAKER_00]: What does it reveal?
[SPEAKER_04]: the degree to which DNI has immersed itself with the FBI beyond just Gabbard watching a search. [SPEAKER_04]: She's cross-designating FBI agents to work for her. [SPEAKER_04]: She's bringing counterintelligence officers down participating in the search. [SPEAKER_04]: That's that's revealing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I think we're being a little the country is being a little naive about where this has started and where this went [SPEAKER_00]: The reason for creating DHS was to create a, in theory at the moment after 9-11, counterterrorism, agency, in addition to what we had at the FBI and our intelligence services. [SPEAKER_00]: And what else happened? [SPEAKER_00]: To coordinate them all. [SPEAKER_00]: And what else happened in that period of time?
[SPEAKER_00]: We took down the alleged wall between intelligence and law enforcement saying that we could now share information. [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe we may think that that was in the court setting, which is how it was usually described. [SPEAKER_00]: It was in the collection setting and the sharing setting. [SPEAKER_00]: Once you took down that wall, okay, a lot of civil liberties advocates were like, oh my god, you know, et cetera, et cetera. [SPEAKER_00]: This is what they predicted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost from the time it was founded, DHS became the largest law enforcement agency in the country. [SPEAKER_00]: That gave it tremendous amount of power without having the kinds of restraints at the FBI had that the prosecutors in our federal court system had, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in a way, this was sort of, and then if you just expand it because you have a president that is exploiting these loopholes that have existed before in this kind of vague who has responsibility for what and who gets to share what, [SPEAKER_00]: It's not surprising to me that we've ended up here and in terms of looking at the search warrant, I think the other line of it is not just, I haven't seen it, but it doesn't matter what it says.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, well, that I think that's the point. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean. [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. [SPEAKER_04]: You know, this was a political exercise. [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a very good topic for discussion for another podcast really soon about this in terms of Walter Bitt walkie on the legal one. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, me, I'm always the walking one, but yeah, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: It's really important and I think it's right in our jurisdiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit before we get to the interview. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit about DHS using this facial recognition technology. [SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of that? [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I mean, I suppose not surprising either since, you know, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies and others are using it, you know, left and right. [SPEAKER_04]: So of course, but it is are we turning into China given the tactics.
[SPEAKER_04]: of ice that we've that have been revealed in Minneapolis most starkly and the random way in which they're dragging people out of cars and outside their homes at all and the many U.S. citizens who have been caught up in this stately. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to have a discussion with Aaron Brown about in which he'll touch on authoritarian governments using facial recognition to clamp down on its citizens.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, you know what you call describe our government right now, but given what ISIS is doing, they certainly fit that seem to fit the picture. [SPEAKER_00]: I hate to be so want you about this. [SPEAKER_00]: Are we turning into China? [SPEAKER_00]: What's a different between us in China on this issue of surveillance privacy and things like that? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, what's the difference is we have the fourth amendment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the question becomes, do we have the fourth amendment? [SPEAKER_00]: And that's really, you know, when you're talking about, are we respecting our laws, not just the fourth amendment? [SPEAKER_00]: There are legal protections as well as constitutional protections, but really the question is, which of the courts are going to [SPEAKER_00]: is the Supreme Court ever going to do anything that would counter what this administration wants to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, de facto are returning into China perhaps, but in terms of where did our laws go? [SPEAKER_00]: Have they just been pushed behind the curtain? [SPEAKER_01]: For what Mike said, I had heard it well, let's worry. [SPEAKER_01]: This is an area of concern, but let's get ice and the border patrol people stop beating up people. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, take off their masks. [SPEAKER_01]: So let's stop busting into business. [SPEAKER_04]: We're right down the vacation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, we're on vacation. [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I mean, Tom home in today did announce this is Thursday that they're going to draw down what 700, 800, I say, juts from Minneapolis. [SPEAKER_04]: That seems to be a step in the right direction, not, of course, what everybody wants, but it's a de-escalation move. [SPEAKER_00]: But that's a different question of when they are present, what powers are they using and how are they collecting information?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what are they doing in terms of treating people on the streets? [SPEAKER_00]: So they can pull out. [SPEAKER_00]: But the real question is, how are they going to behave wherever they are? [SPEAKER_04]: Where are they getting recent? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, not at all moment here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, on to our interview with Aaron Brown of CIA veteran former US Army Ranger even worked as a cop at one point between his time in the army and going to CIA. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, he's become a leading expert. [SPEAKER_01]: on surveillance technologies he founded a company called lumber up which is monitoring and I think developing is a little bit shadowy what is doing on the advanced technologies including AI.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's going to talk to us about what's going on in that front and after these messages we'll bring them on. [SPEAKER_01]: Aaron Brown, welcome to Spitealk. [SPEAKER_01]: You have quite the background 13 years in clandestine operations at CIA and ended. [SPEAKER_01]: I think you were ahead of operations in Southeast Asia. [SPEAKER_01]: You were an Army Ranger, toughest of the tough.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I might say, and you did a transition from the Army Rangers to a police force in Wisconsin before joining the CIA. [SPEAKER_01]: But to get to our point today, you were quoted in a lengthy piece by David Ignatius in the Washington Post last summer about innovations in espionage, that's right in the heart of our interests here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what came clear to me or apparent to me was that the agency was way behind [SPEAKER_01]: and one former senior operative described it as a sarcophagus of innovation. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, dead. [SPEAKER_01]: So, is that your understanding as well and has the CIA caught up at all? [SPEAKER_01]: Are they waking up to the innovations and the revolution and an espionage technology?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that article was fun for me to respond to after the fact that's our topic is comment being particularly interesting. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'll help out my friend Ed Bogin there who said that he meant sarcophagus in that you can't get [SPEAKER_03]: the internet in there very easily. [SPEAKER_03]: You can't get AI in there very easily. [SPEAKER_03]: And so it's like living inside a sealed off container rather than dead. [SPEAKER_03]: But most people took it as dead.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that was a little bit different. [SPEAKER_03]: But what he was trying to imply is very much, well, I also believe that it's really hard to get innovation into a place that has to try to ensure that they keep the secrets inside [SPEAKER_03]: the more seamless information flows back and forth and so it is not an easy task that's for sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will say unequivocally the agency is starting to catch up and they were even catching up at the time of that article and I think people were many folks who hadn't been as close to the problem as I have were still kind of responding to the agency of 2021, 2022 and now as the CIA is known to do certainly during the bin Laden era and some of the other [SPEAKER_03]: great CT successes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once they get going and they recognize the problem they come up with a plan to fix it, they could go very fast. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's what I'm witnessing. [SPEAKER_01]: I guess I could overview a question before I know Mike and Karen have their own questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have seen generations of movies and we've read books about CIA tradecraft, dramatized, you know, a guy trying to shake his surveillance and he changes his outfits and his look, even uses plastic face, facial changes and so on. [SPEAKER_01]: Is that all dead? [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, is it possible? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it impossible for say a CIA officer in Moscow or Beijing to get away from surveillance now? [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it also penetrating?
[SPEAKER_01]: with the electronics that there's no there's no hiding anymore. [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, even hiding as this article brought up, even hiding can draw attention. [SPEAKER_01]: So is it all dead as dead drops, brush passes, et cetera. [SPEAKER_01]: It's at all dead. [SPEAKER_03]: I would say definitely not all dead, I will absolutely say much, much harder, incredibly more difficult.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you pointed out, I think, one of the quotes that I gave is that the more that you attempt to hide now, [SPEAKER_03]: the more that you stand out because, you know, the act of hiding itself creates a dead spot in data. [SPEAKER_03]: And for most people in the world, you don't have dead spots in data. [SPEAKER_03]: You're connected all the time, almost no matter what you're doing. [SPEAKER_03]: But that the hazard then is if you're connected, you're trackable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's really a multifaceted, you know, 360 degree knife fight against digital surveillance. [SPEAKER_03]: But going back to almost what I said before, [SPEAKER_03]: who are starting to find space, which obviously because it's working, and I obviously should have talked about it here, and I don't even know about the best stuff that's working right now, but they're starting to get their problems. [SPEAKER_03]: Their hands around this problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: It does not look like it used to, for sure. [SPEAKER_03]: Speaking not even in the classified domain right now, and if you just go to credit card companies baking, anything that requires authenticity, authorization, [SPEAKER_03]: commercial industry is crushing it, which is one of the problems. [SPEAKER_03]: And facial recognition is powerful now. [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, age verification starts to be able to determine is that person wearing a mask.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that person done something to their face that's artificial. [SPEAKER_03]: And they can they now have systems in the commercial environment that can spot that. [SPEAKER_03]: Whereas they used to just be human eyeballs that could spot that. [SPEAKER_03]: There's a ATM machine that now you don't have to put your pin in.
[SPEAKER_03]: You just walk up in your gate, the way your body moves, the geometry of your arm should do to your nose is such a unique fingerprint that they don't even require your pin because they're so confident of who you are based on your gate. [SPEAKER_03]: That's, that's not a fun space to be in if you're a spy. [SPEAKER_04]: So just to flesh this out a little bit, the lead example in the Ignatius piece in which it was going to use about facial recognition and the issue is that.
[SPEAKER_04]: the governments and intelligence agencies, the CIA is spying on all have facial recognition that allows them to identify, make it more easy for them to identify the CIA spooks who are spying on them and then you also raise the gate analysis, how you walk can tell you something. [SPEAKER_04]: So how does the CIA, how does a Western intelligence agency thwart that? [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I'll, I'd even zoom up beyond even just CI officers.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think what's becoming really fascinating and interesting to me, and I think interesting also to the CI is that this is a privacy problem for literally any human, you know, the threat is different. [SPEAKER_03]: If you're trying to spy versus if you happen to be a wager in China and you're dissonant and you're trying to stay off the China radar, the, in fact, the threat if you're a wager is potentially death.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the threat if you're a CI officer is probably just getting kicked [SPEAKER_03]: the risks are not the same, but the technology that's being used against you is exactly the same. [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think the ways that we get around this is I think starting to really understand how to use AI offensively.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you see a bunch of really interesting technologies, mostly young people who are are figuring out how to use this technology in ways that no one really imagined to do a lot of [SPEAKER_03]: techniques that that I think are going to play out. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't I can't say for sure if the CIA are using them right now, but I would be surprised if they're not to you know, so just to give you like one more quick example of like the more you hide the more you stand out.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not just a question of does the facial recognition recognize me as Aaron Brown and and put together you know from the OPM hack or something that that I'm a spy is that if it does, if it sees my face and doesn't recognize me as anyone that it has in its database, I'm suspicious. [SPEAKER_03]: And so just drawing to speech and onto yourself and espionage becomes a critical thing because now they have a reason to look at you.
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't know that you're a spying necessarily, but you've used the eye of sworn has sort of come onto you. [SPEAKER_03]: And so you need to have ways to tell the system this is not this is not a spy and it's not suspicious.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, how do you do that so again, I'm going to I'm going to stay away from anything classified so I can preserve all the things I need to preserve my job, but I'll give you hypotheticals and like the best part is I don't know I don't I don't get to plug into this stuff as much anymore. [SPEAKER_03]: So I can speculate and if I get it close to right, I had to blame just my intuition that's being correct here.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you think about a database, so if I wanted to trick a database into not recognizing me as a spy, but also not highlighting me as someone who's not supposed to see, maybe the database needs to have an injection that when it sees my face, it says that I'm business person, ABCDEF, I am not tripped up flagged as a spy, and I'm also not flagged as suspicious.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, the more that AI allows for cyber operations to be much more effective in across the larger spots of the digital space, the more I think we can do things offensively to give ourselves an edge. [SPEAKER_03]: We still own the AI space. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, just to follow up on that, I remember the first time I went through TSA airport security and there was facial recognition and I got kind of spooked.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, of course, they immediately tell you, we're not going to keep this. [SPEAKER_04]: You hold all of you. [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know whether you believe them or not and how about when you fly overseas and facial recognition when you go through airport [SPEAKER_04]: Um, you know, should we trust the TSA and how about all those foreign airports and, um, yeah. [SPEAKER_04]: So what does one do about it?
[SPEAKER_03]: No. [SPEAKER_03]: So, um, I trust that the TSA agent that's telling you that it's not saved is telling the truth. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, and I trust that. [SPEAKER_04]: who are actually popping up on the screen. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, that's right. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you did. [SPEAKER_03]: So I trust that the person who built the system, the entity that built the system was given that as a requirement and that's what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: But like, if you're China and you know you have the system where anyone who's passing through to travel somewhere is delivering a unique identifier to them. [SPEAKER_03]: You're trying to get access to that system such that you can, you know, at the point of facial recognition, can it at least get. [SPEAKER_03]: The indication, you know, Aaron Brown was at the DCA airport at this time of this state going into this place.
[SPEAKER_03]: Individually, that's interesting, but in the aggregate, that's a real wealth of information about how is everybody moving around and what does it mean? [SPEAKER_03]: That's the heartbeat, you know, of not only operations, which is what's the United States up to. [SPEAKER_03]: If an entire mergers and acquisitions team that's working on the TikTok deal, for example, all travels to Texas and goes to Oracle, they all get on flights at the same time around the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: and all end up in Austin, wherever Oracle exists. [SPEAKER_03]: Then China has some commercial intelligence about what those people are doing. [SPEAKER_03]: And the best way to know that will either be what are their cell phones up to or what are their travel records. [SPEAKER_03]: Look like, and we know for a fact with salt-type food where China has deeply penetrated our telecommunications infrastructure that they're definitely monitoring it that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you have, and the OPM hack is such a great example and it's so old now. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's explain that, let's just take a second of the OPM hack. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so Officer Personnel Management is the place in the United States government that keeps track of everyone's personnel files across the entire government. [SPEAKER_03]: And they also know things like what your security clearance is, where your security clearance was issued.
[SPEAKER_03]: And many things can be told about a person based on the style of security clearance that have and where that security clearance was issued. [SPEAKER_03]: And so when the Chinese government stole it, [SPEAKER_03]: millions and millions of records. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm in it, lots of our colleagues are in it. [SPEAKER_03]: And so that they can just use that as a source of truth for here is Aaron Brown, what did he do in the government?
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's his personal file look like. [SPEAKER_03]: So incredibly debilitating from the perspective of secrecy, but a great indication of like what what the the Chinese specific that cable of the Russians are are very capable in this regard to and then non state actors now armed with AI are becoming in some cases just as capable. [SPEAKER_03]: that your record is available at this point, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no one that can assume I've escaped being disclosed in some kind of reach somewhere where the puzzle pieces come together and my whole person is exposed. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just to give in at this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to follow up on what you said about just, you know, Oracle, just to give an example because one of the things that's clear from the Ignatius article is the way in which a lot of the attempts to, you know, upgrade and modernize the CIA for things that it has noticed it's been lacking in for actually decades since George tenant, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Has been carried by the private sector.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that the private sector and you've gone from the intelligence world to the private sector world. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm wondering how you think about this in terms of it's not really outsourcing, it's sort of like in-sourcing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, you know, in 20 years ago, I can just hear the controversy over this like, no, we're not going to let the private sector into this and I'm [SPEAKER_00]: Curious how you assess the pros and cons and the risks associated with the way in which how deeply dependent the intelligence community seems to be intertwined with and dependent on the private sector and how you think about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, it's just a good question of need, you know, speaking of the CIA, but not just the CIA, you know, when when they were building spy satellites and credible surveillance aircraft and, you know, little little listening devices that were power and on, you know, the, the most impressive batteries anyone's ever seen that was out of necessity because there was no one in the private sector that could build that. [SPEAKER_03]: They needed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: They had enough scientific know how to say we think we can build it. [SPEAKER_03]: There's no there's no commercial market for it. [SPEAKER_03]: And so we'll just build it that is totally flipped now and the technologies that are most powerful for the [SPEAKER_03]: shift. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I don't there are synonyms glorious enough to qualify what I think is going to happen in the near term and the and the challenges is that is just being developed in the private sector.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, nobody in the government is going to put a hundred billion dollars into a training run for a model if there's no commercial interest right. [SPEAKER_03]: And so there are risks for sure, but I think the risk of not taking on commercial technology is much much higher so the reason I transitioned out here. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think everyone believes me when I say it because I'm now a CEO of a company coming back in and tempting to do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, bring a product, but I think of myself as still a chief of base. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, loomers my company, I think of myself as chief of base of Lumbra. [SPEAKER_03]: I just couldn't get myself out there under the government's guys. [SPEAKER_03]: And so now I'm out here under my own. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what the BSEI officers have ever done going all the way back to the OSS. [SPEAKER_01]: Aaron, we have to take a short break, speaking of commercial interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll go back on just a second. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're back, Erin, Karen had a follow-up question. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, are there protections in place so that, and I'm not, I'm not even talking about, you know, selling these secrets or these, you know, new applications to foreign entities. [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, what we've seen in the past is that sometimes private citizens, private groups can sometimes empower themselves to do things that the government should be doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there any protections built in and I'm sure there are, but what do they look like against this this technology being used by private citizens for whatever reasons they want? [SPEAKER_03]: Sure, the protections for the private citizens using them is is a little bit more challenging. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, get we probably would have to come up with a specific technology for me to think through an example.
[SPEAKER_03]: The protections I'm more concerned with as a citizen is these jumping the trance over to autocratic governments because the ease of use now is just so so simple. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think we have a decent amount of protections built into our system here. [SPEAKER_03]: You had to be very careful about how you potentially sell it to other governments. [SPEAKER_03]: Even friends of the United States is difficult in the export controls. [SPEAKER_03]: Play a role here.
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to update those systems for sure because like right now, it says you can't take your laptop to the foreign country. [SPEAKER_03]: If you're doing company work on the laptop, most of us work in the cloud. [SPEAKER_03]: The laptop is just device to get to the cloud. [SPEAKER_03]: That's kind of an outdated policy protection.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have to definitely update these and think about what it means that digital boundaries don't exist the way that physical boundaries do. [SPEAKER_03]: Every day people, I think it's the same laws that we already have in place, they need to be updated. [SPEAKER_03]: But I could track. [SPEAKER_03]: given an opportunity and I wanted to sort of like, you know, become the neighborhood watch, you know, from my little neighborhood here in Virginia.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I got, you know, 10 of my neighbors to agree to like set up cameras that they gave me the feeds to. [SPEAKER_03]: I guarantee you we would never be robbed without a suspect in view. [SPEAKER_03]: You might see that and be like, Peck, yeah, let's do that. [SPEAKER_03]: That sounds great, but what comes along with that is that then Aaron Brown, you know, neighbor at such and such street and address, now knows the coming and goings of everybody all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And do you really want me to know that? [SPEAKER_03]: You might think you do right now, but you probably don't. [SPEAKER_01]: Yesterday, I went to a lecture by a Nick F. Demiades, who we've had on the podcast before, he's an expert on Chinese espionage, and he's quite an alarming picture of China's success and penetrating American commercial entities, especially in the aerospace and technology field.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, what can you tell us if anything about China's ability to steal, [SPEAKER_01]: maybe they don't even need to steal it from us at this point. [SPEAKER_01]: What have they penetrated our intelligence technology companies so they can steal the technology and use it against us? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, I think you just saw in the last couple of days another arrest out of Google, which is a perfect example. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not even the most recent one.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that didn't take any special technology. [SPEAKER_01]: That guy just defected the China. [SPEAKER_01]: Took all in Google's engineering expertise with him. [SPEAKER_01]: Old fashion, old time, he stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: And the guy before him was a guy named Ding Lu way did something very similar for a lot of their AI TPU technology, their version of the GPU that so many folks are probably familiar with.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're exactly right, a lot of this is doesn't involve the trade craft, doesn't involve any of the old school techniques, it's just straight up commercial espionage. [SPEAKER_03]: And the problem is, is that so much of what used to be [SPEAKER_03]: needed to be protected were were systems just going back to what Karen mentioned systems that were built inside the government and so we built up protections for those.
[SPEAKER_03]: In order to ensure that they they couldn't be stolen if they had to be if they were going to be stolen there going to be stolen through espionage techniques commercial companies to not have systems for this protection and they and they're in the opposite position and this is we're like you know American kids and.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, many of the folks in non-autocratic countries, you do like ghost study math through a much larger degree in engineering, because the Chinese are our kick in our butts here. [SPEAKER_03]: And so when a Google needs someone who's an expert in, you know, some really obscure amount of engineering that's required for AI, it is often a Chinese national. [SPEAKER_03]: who has to be employed to even make that progress.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, the individual people, when you meet them, are going to be amazing people. [SPEAKER_03]: Some of them are doing more good work for America than Americans themselves. [SPEAKER_03]: But the second that their grandfather's chemo is turned off in Shenzhen. [SPEAKER_03]: And they're told, well, turn it back on only if you bring us the model weights for this AI lab.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no, they're not, they don't, they don't view it as doing anything wrong necessarily other than, you know, violating their employment agreement, but come on. [SPEAKER_03]: They're not, they're not spying. [SPEAKER_03]: And so, well, of course they are. [SPEAKER_03]: That makes it real tough. [SPEAKER_03]: But they are, but I mean, in their mind, they're, they're, they're repurchase technology for the whole country, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we don't have that ability to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have Americans working for Chinese companies in that kind of sector where we can flip the game. [SPEAKER_01]: Signac the right. [SPEAKER_04]: But Aaron, it's not just the commercial firms that are been penetrated. [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, the CIA itself, we know that in China, they rolled up a whole bunch of undercover, [SPEAKER_04]: operatives in China. [SPEAKER_04]: And also I believe in Iran.
[SPEAKER_04]: So isn't that exactly an example of the threat that you're talking about here that using high tech to penetrate even secure systems operation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so, you know, one to counter intelligence risk the other is just to standard espionage risk and I think, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm much less familiar with that one than the Iranian one, but I mean again, again, just speculating, whereas what we know from what's been released in the press with regards to the Chinese, they just, they have the most
[SPEAKER_03]: amazing integrated surveillance system on the planet and they have tested it on their own people, they have refined it. [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't built to catch vise, right? [SPEAKER_03]: They didn't think, wow, you know, if we built this, we could just catch all the espionage, but I don't know, they built it to control their own population and to, you know, tamp down and dissent. [SPEAKER_03]: It just so happens that the benefit of it happens to be, well, you could do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can catch everyone else doing anything wrong [SPEAKER_03]: It just becomes, when you have, I forget what the numbers are using, no, the right time I had 100 million CCT cameras or something like that. [SPEAKER_03]: It might even be a billion. [SPEAKER_03]: At this point, when you have a camera that's effectively facing all areas of public space, and you have a suspicion about something, well, you can rewind the tape.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you have a workforce, [SPEAKER_03]: that is, orders of magnitude more than anyone else has available to them in both the military and national security spaces. [SPEAKER_03]: You have the people available to rewind the tape and actually really work to figure out what's going on. [SPEAKER_03]: And now they have the AI to do it agentically, which is a whole other arena that we haven't even seen play out in real time yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've talked about us and trying to wonder about the Russians or other adversaries. [SPEAKER_01]: Are they [SPEAKER_03]: The Russians are what we're seeing from the Chinese government is a real amazing ability to execute a strategy at huge scale. [SPEAKER_03]: The Russians are just much better at tactics, right? [SPEAKER_03]: There's strategy in what they do, but their individual successes often look tactical.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so their cyber groups are usually not focused on some kind of grand plan rise, I think China's are. [SPEAKER_03]: Their cyber groups are usually looking at some kind of disruption that will have a tactical advantage for Russian [SPEAKER_03]: fancy bear attacks that are designed to say, hey, can we shut down the the gas pipelines in the United States? [SPEAKER_03]: Is there is their real goal? [SPEAKER_03]: Something strategic there. [SPEAKER_03]: I think not.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think they just want to say if we needed to wreak havoc for a moment in time, do we have the ability as we do? [SPEAKER_03]: Whereas the Chinese think what if we penetrate it all the places that we can get all the data such that when you add it all the ones and zeros together, we knew all the things totally different approach equally capable to the degree of getting into the systems, but just with different designs on the on the plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, Aaron, I have a question about what this means for, I have a couple of questions following up on that. [SPEAKER_00]: One is, what does this mean for human intelligence? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're talking about the tech world and, you know, data collection and data analysis, et cetera, et cetera. [SPEAKER_00]: But what about human beings as spies?
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that, you know, with all of this ability to, you know, look at one's gate connected with one's [SPEAKER_00]: facial recognition, etc., etc., is it over that we can't use human spies? [SPEAKER_00]: Are there new programs being developed to rethink how to do this? [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, where does this now stand in terms of trust and confidence of intelligence professionals? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll maybe work backwards and say, I think you can take it to the bank that as long as the CIA is in existence, there will always be new programs for doing, you know, the second oldest profession. [SPEAKER_03]: And so that that one's all, I don't think that will change any time soon. [SPEAKER_03]: And then to get into the first part, it may make the numbers of what you can do smaller, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's just the more, you know, people you put on the space, the more data you're [SPEAKER_03]: you know, dots, you, you allowed to be connected. [SPEAKER_03]: And so, but I think, Sminus, especially in the era of deep fakes and voice clones, like, how can you ever be sure if you want to be an agent, and you give some critical piece of information to a foreign power that you think they need to have for whatever your purpose is?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you get on the phone or a Skype call or a Google call or you know, or signal, whatever. [SPEAKER_03]: And before you'd have to be like, well, if the Chinese were going to call me, they have to find someone who speaks unaccited English idiomatic that understands American culture to be able to at least convince me that I'm talking to an American no more.
[SPEAKER_03]: perfect idiomatic English that are going to know exactly the trade craft of any espionade service to place that signal call. [SPEAKER_03]: And so what you're and the same thing for a video is coming as fast if not already here as the audio. [SPEAKER_03]: And so then what that's going to then I think revert back to is the only thing you're going to trust as a human in person. [SPEAKER_03]: If you really really want to be sure and so I can't see how that won't persist.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you cut, you realize you're under constant surveillance and many dimensions of surveillance. [SPEAKER_01]: So you have to have personal meetings in some way. [SPEAKER_01]: But how do you have these personal meetings if you're under this constant surveillance? [SPEAKER_01]: This is when you cannot enter a country anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, with all the biometric screening that goes on in airports, you can't fly into say Saudi Arabia, go to your hotel, change your passport, change your clothing, etc. [SPEAKER_01]: and move on to the next place to meet an agent. [SPEAKER_01]: That's over, right? [SPEAKER_03]: So this is where I have to hope that I disappoint the three of you that you get off the call with me and you're like, gosh, that guy was a hard nut to crack on some of these tough questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because that's the role I think I have to play here if I'm going to be allowed to be part of the solution. [SPEAKER_03]: But this is where I'm going to go back to without again breaking any news and say, this is where we have to, this is where we have the advantage technologically in the United States. [SPEAKER_03]: Like the most sophisticated AI and the most sophisticated systems right now are still being built in this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: By Americans and it looks like we have that edge for some time to come. [SPEAKER_03]: We have to preserve it. [SPEAKER_03]: So we think about what edge do we have to make sure we ensure and this is where like is it should be be selling GPUs to China. [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's a tricky question to answer. [SPEAKER_03]: I kind of can see both sides, but I think I come down on. [SPEAKER_03]: I think we should give them no advantage.
[SPEAKER_03]: At this point, because we need to maintain this edge, I think if we can maintain this edge, there are so many more tools in our tool belt right now for subterfuge than there ever were before. [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think what we're going to see is we're going to have to become just as we were with masks and tradecraft. [SPEAKER_03]: techniques for surveillance back in the day and sort of the, you know, the analog era.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're now going to have to become that good at using technology to create the space to do those operations. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'll tell you right now, they don't evolve me in those things right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: But. [SPEAKER_03]: But if we did, those would be the things where like I would be just as offended at myself as anyone else that they start talking about that because the second that becomes public at no longer works and that puts a lot of things at risk, but I think we can take to the bank that they're on that they're on the path towards real solutions in this space. [SPEAKER_01]: So we have more tools for subterfused than ever before that kind of takes us a full circle.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to bring up something else and I know it's on Mike's mind as well. [SPEAKER_01]: DHS Border Patrol ICE, they're starting to use facial recognition technology here. [SPEAKER_01]: Do you worry about this technology being in bad hands in this administration? [SPEAKER_03]: So I, I, I, I, I may, please don't track me kind of person at, at, to my core, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I, it's, this is a weird space that people like practitioners like me are in and that the more that we have things to track with, the more effective we are at our job, but the more that we have things to track with means other people have things to track us with. [SPEAKER_03]: And that feels bad to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's, I'm, I'm in a constant, um, coral with myself about being excited about a technology that allows me to do something spectacular [SPEAKER_03]: makes intelligence way easier. [SPEAKER_03]: At the same time, I'm like, wow, now this could be used against me, and my family, and all of that. [SPEAKER_03]: That doesn't seem like a great idea.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so yeah, facial recognition, just digital surveillance itself, especially with a genetic AI coming into the field and coming into its own right now, just makes tracking infinitely easier and it makes me so nervous. [SPEAKER_03]: Even in the hands of a well-meaning government, you know, recognizing your time, I'll give you one example of which I think we're unfortunately going to get to see in our lifetimes.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to see AI models and go to Dario modees, last essay on this in the last, [SPEAKER_03]: two weeks or so. [SPEAKER_03]: He writes very good essays on what's coming. [SPEAKER_03]: And we're going to see AI that's going to be capable of designing a biological weapon that could have massive effects. [SPEAKER_03]: And what we're going to find is that people who had the motivation to do that for the longest time, this goes back to the realm of terrorism, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: People constantly ask me, why are terrorists more effective? [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, fortunately, the people who come to arrest often are extraordinarily [SPEAKER_03]: And so we have to be lucky, they're motivated to be a terrorist, but they have no idea how to form a plan and carry it out. [SPEAKER_03]: That's the only, one of the only reasons. [SPEAKER_03]: Same thing for someone who wants to, you know, kill a million people with a biological weapon.
[SPEAKER_03]: Fortunately, often haven't, don't have a PhD in biology. [SPEAKER_03]: but they don't need anymore because they have a PHA in their pocket. [SPEAKER_03]: And so if they have the motivation, they might now have the new house. [SPEAKER_03]: So here's where surveillance becomes really tricky.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I tell you that now we have that and the only way to stop that is if we deploy an extraordinarily effective surveillance system that I will guarantee you will spot anyone who ever tries to bring one of these biological weapons into existence, will you say no to that? [SPEAKER_03]: If I tell you it's absolutely coming, I think most of us are gonna say, we're gonna consider it, and most of us are gonna say yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, can I I just want to bring back the human element here for one, one second, which is that given everything you're saying what what I think a lot of people have the question of yeah you set it you know all of this because of the data collection and analysis, but who's doing the analysis is the machines that are doing the analysis and and how I'm assuming that you just trust that this kind of analytics and you not just you but you know larger group of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems to me that there's an awful lot of just plain technology knows how to do it. [SPEAKER_00]: When I know that individuals in the intelligence field really pride themselves on their own analytical interpretation. [SPEAKER_00]: So where does the human begin in the technological end and how do they mix? [SPEAKER_03]: shifting target literally by the hour right now, but I will say to you that more and more of these systems are explainable, they are interpretable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when you have a system that's really good at looking at huge loss of data, so when I say about a genetic eye now that I think helps people sort of visualize what happens here, they're extraordinarily good at hard to generate data problems.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you have a huge set of data, one of the examples we show is all the time is looking at an image anywhere in the world and one of those images that could be in Australia, it could be in Florida, it could be in Tuesday, you know, Malaysia and the case I exactly uses actually Tel Aviv, which kind of, you know, looks like.
[SPEAKER_03]: South East Asia in some places and other places that looks like Greece right and I have people try to guess it No one ever guesses Tel Avie because it looks so much like some other place That is a hard to generate thing because it could be any one of a million or a billion places in the world AI guesses the insulin knows exactly where it is every single time it says this is Tel Avie on the corner of blah blah The cool part about that is once you know where it is going back and validating that that's correct is a two second problem
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an infinite problem for humans to figure out where it is, but it's a two-second problem to validate. [SPEAKER_03]: And so the same thing happens here. [SPEAKER_03]: The analysis that AI does is looks across billions and billions of data points and says, here's one of the answers that you're looking for. [SPEAKER_03]: Here's 10 answers. [SPEAKER_03]: Now you can go back and say, do I think those answers are right? [SPEAKER_03]: And the story of how AI got there is now terrible.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's how AI analysis, what that allows is analysts to use their time to do logic problems rather than discovery, which was 80% of their task up until now. [SPEAKER_04]: So Aaron you were a counterterrorism officer when you were a CIA.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm actually did a upon cast last week on the current state of the counterterrorism threat we had done [SPEAKER_04]: Colin Clark from the Sufon Center on talking and he said a couple of things that I think are relevant to this discussion. [SPEAKER_04]: One of the things we talked about, of course, was the Islamic state and course on.
[SPEAKER_04]: You were saying before that the terrorist are pretty bad at planning, but sometimes they do succeed and Islamic state has pulled off some pretty spectacular operations in recent years in Moscow and around. [SPEAKER_04]: and elsewhere. [SPEAKER_04]: But one of the points that we drilled down is they're using AI right now.
[SPEAKER_04]: These Lomix State Coruscant, after the the the Crocus musical attack in a couple years ago it was create use AI to create fake news anchors to broadcast and propaganda is about the attack that they just pulled off. [SPEAKER_04]: So the bad guys, you know, are working on the, with the same technology we are, how, my first question is how much, how concerning should that be? [SPEAKER_03]: You concerning. [SPEAKER_03]: This is similar to the biological, there's overlap here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, the, you know, been a lot in spent a lot of time trying to determine if he could produce a biological weapon that would have a greater effect than, you know, human spine airplanes. [SPEAKER_03]: Not only are they capable of planning the capable of carrying out spectacular attacks and not 11 stands out as the, you know, the one that's most notable but, but for the most part, you know, they're like one out of 10,000 or something that they plan and bring to fruition.
[SPEAKER_03]: So my worry is AI has the potential to really up that ratio. [SPEAKER_03]: Because you go from, you know, you just remember back from some of the 9-11 planners, the research they were doing about how they were supposed to dress and should they were cologne and these, you know, these questions that they were just getting wrong left and right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, now you asked chat to PT and you have the exact right answer on those all the time those are trivial ones obviously, but like when you can stack right answers on top of right answers you get much more likely to to get further along in your plan, you know, and I think. [SPEAKER_03]: that is concerning because it's really hard to stop that.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you can't use CHAPT right now to plot a terrorist plan from, you know, eight is ed, thankfully, but you can certainly go from A to B, B to C, C to D, as long as you're not connecting it together as a terrorism plot. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think they get that and that's the other. [SPEAKER_04]: The other point he made and I'd like to get your thoughts on is especially after the U.S. pull out from Afghanistan in 2021.
[SPEAKER_04]: We lost our presence there and that meant we also lost any ability to for a human on what these terrorist groups particularly this Islamic state is up to. [SPEAKER_04]: And he suggested that while our signals intelligence is still good, the human particularly on these [SPEAKER_04]: You know, really nasty terrorist groups is virtually non-existent at this point. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's no replacement replacement for proximity.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, a face-to-face meeting, I've met a lot of... [SPEAKER_03]: bad about that. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, bad guy. [SPEAKER_03]: I hesitate because they weren't all terrorists right there. [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of them were were terrorists adjacent. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, and, you know, an Arabic was my, my, my, uh, my language is your, um, and I, uh, I don't even know the jurors right there. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just to prove the point that it was Arabic. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, not right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I know I know French, uh, but the, I think there's just no question when you can have the proximity and the frequency of engagements and, and human, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a game changer, as we saw, we dismantled Al Qaeda from 2009 to 2012, and the engagements there on the ground were instrumental in that obviously the bin Laden piece was very much technology-driven and not necessarily driven by humans, but all that allowed that to be possible what was human focus and proximity focused. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think there could be a good movie made. [SPEAKER_01]: Ha ha ha.
[SPEAKER_01]: Based on a guy like you who invents all this incredibly sophisticated and deceptive technology and it comes back to bite him. [SPEAKER_03]: So. [SPEAKER_03]: I wrote a screenplay. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to send it to David Mishas, actually. [SPEAKER_03]: He encouraged me. [SPEAKER_03]: I said, I got, that's my idea. [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, I think you should write some of these down and send me Netflix. [SPEAKER_03]: So, well, maybe I'll send it to your guys this way too.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could let me know if I'm on the right track. [SPEAKER_01]: I'll all look forward to that movie. [SPEAKER_01]: We have to wrap it up now. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for coming on the show here. [SPEAKER_01]: It has been a lot of fun talking to you guys. [SPEAKER_03]: You guys kept on my toes. [SPEAKER_03]: This is the most I've been on my toes yet. [SPEAKER_03]: I want to be so good. [SPEAKER_03]: Good job. [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a pretty scary actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go. [SPEAKER_03]: Optimism is our we didn't get to close with the optimism, but the optimism is great. [SPEAKER_03]: Like we're going to your cancer. [SPEAKER_03]: we're going to do a lot of things with biology and aging that would have been impossible even 18 months ago. [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm optimistic that those are going to be, that's the way we're going to go. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just we got to get there carefully. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, good for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not that optimistic. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, thanks for coming on to Spide Talk podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: It was really fun. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's it for this week's by-talk. [SPEAKER_01]: Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you haven't already, do check out thespytalk.co news site on Substack, where we offer a steady diet of scoops in the original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations. [SPEAKER_01]: Just Google Spy Talk. [SPEAKER_01]: You're quickly find your way there. [SPEAKER_01]: This edition of the SpyTalk podcast was smoothly produced, as always, by can I, and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media. [SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: See you around. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Jeff Stein. [SPEAKER_01]: Am I going to go to the golf? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Karen Greenberg. [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening.