Michael Morell speaks with author Amy Zegart on IntelMattersPod about the impact of emerging technologies on intelligence collection and analysis
MICHAEL MORELL: Amy, welcome. It is about time that we invited you to join us on Intelligence Matters.
AMY ZEGART: Well, Michael, let me just say that it is really means a lot to me that you think my work is good. It's a strange thing to study intelligence as an academic from the outside. I got into intelligence completely by accident; so I had worked in the summer while I was in graduate school at the National Security Council staff, and I decided I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on the NSC. And I came back to Stanford and I told my Ph.D.
AMY ZEGART: I think it's really intimidating, but apparently I'm quite a masochist when it comes to research. I started it off, Michael, as a China person, so I studied East Asian studies in college and I went to China right after Tiananmen. And I remember thinking at the time, 'I can't study China anymore because it's too opaque. It's too hard to understand.
The second piece, though, is that technological overlay. So as you and I have talked about a lot, emerging technologies from A.I. to quantum to internet connectivity to the commercial satellite revolution are fundamentally challenging every aspect of intelligence. And so I wanted to take a harder look at what that means.
MICHAEL MORELL: Are there a couple of those day in the life story, Amy, that stand out to you that really resonate with you, that you could share with us? So Amy, the heart of the book, I think, from my perspective, is where we are today and where we're going. And you write, and I quote you here, 'The U.S. is losing its intelligence advantage.' That's a big statement. What makes you say that?
The fourth 'more' is more customers who need intelligence to keep the country safe and to advance our interests, like voters, tech leaders, critical infrastructure leaders. AMY ZEGART: Michael, you always ask the tough analytic questions. I think the convergence has happened really in the past decade or so. So I think about a few key indicators that, you know, 'We're not in Kansas anymore.' One was when the CIA went on Twitter in 2014. So when a secret agency joined social media, you know times are changing.
AMY ZEGART: I think about it together. So how can we get information? How can we protect information? How can we use information? I think those are all critical parts of this puzzle. And so when I think about denied environments, which really that's what we're talking about with distributed sensors, it's much harder to get human intelligence right.
MICHAEL MORELL:MSo, Amy, there's a couple of other things that you focused on and where we are today that I wanted to ask you about. One -and I think you hinted at it already - is the crisis in intelligence education. What did you mean by that? And then it's, you know, to beat up on my own discipline for a minute, I actually gathered data on the top three journals in political science over 15 years. So from 9/11 to 2016, how many articles did they produce? Almost 3,000 articles. How many articles actually examined in a serious way anything related to U.S. intelligence? Five. So while intelligence issues were front and center for policy makers, for the media, for the world, we in the academy were studying just about everything else.
And so what that means is members of Congress, however well-meaning they are, have very weak incentives to devote the time to learn about intelligence and oversee intelligence, and they can't even talk about what they do, right. It's an electoral loser from a congressional perspective. And as you know, the 9/11 Commission, all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission were implemented, except their recommendations with regard to congressional oversight.
AMY ZEGART: So, Michael, I'm going to say something that I know a lot of people will disagree with me about, which is that I think we need to add yet another intelligence agency to our intelligence community. We have 18. I am usually reluctant to add one more because I think if one of the chief challenges is coordination, the more agencies you have to coordinate, the harder coordination becomes.
We have three thousand, roughly, satellites, active satellites orbiting the Earth today. That number is supposed to increase to somewhere like 100,000 satellites in the next 10 years or so. And what that means is that you can have fast revisit rates so you can see the same place on Earth multiple times a day. Think about the dynamic picture that you can get with that kind of information - and all of it is open, right? It's available at low cost or no cost.
And critically, he's drawn attention to getting talent in the door faster. At the end of the day, intelligence is a human endeavor. You live this; you know this better than I do. But it takes too long and it's too hard to get the most talented people in the door. And that has to change. And I think that's been a top priority of his as well.
And then this CIA technology fellows, right? Which is a recognition at least on the technology front of what you talked about, the difficulty of getting people in the door not only from a time perspective, but from a perspective of competing with the private sector for talent. So a way to get people in the door very similar to the White House Fellows program, right, which brings the most talented people into the government for a year, and they're free to leave after that year.
You know, it's always good to kind of baseline yourself against what other people are doing. And I wonder if there's things that other intelligence services are doing out there that would make a lot of sense to copy. And one of the striking things that I remember is one of the questions I asked my students was, 'Do you think intelligence agencies have too much power, too little power or about the right amount of power?' And at the beginning of the class, the vast majority of students said too much power. These were controversies in the news. They were really worried about the intelligence agencies running amok.
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