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