I am joined by Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science, past co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, to talk about her new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, and all about Spies, and Intelligence Agency.
We all have seen a dozen of Spies movies, movies about intelligence, we read books about it, we knew who is James Bond, Mission Impossible and all.
But the question is still out there, what are spies? What are the intelligence agencies? What are the covert intelligence agencies?
In this episode, I am joined by Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science, past co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, to talk about her new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.
That book is like the textbook for spies and intelligence 101! Conversation with Amy was so fascinating as we touched upon the topics like, why do we need spies and intelligence, cyber security, cyber-warfare, which apparently we are at war all year round, and we even talked about how a commercial company like Google, Facebook, and others might have more data on us than the government agencies!
Listen to the episode, and tweet at me @jaltucher if you like this episodes!
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James Altucher 0:01
This isn't your average business podcast. And he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on the James Altucher show, oh boy, I didn't know there were 19 different intelligence agencies in the US forces, the CIA. There's the FBI, there's the DIA, which is the Defense Intelligence Agency. But there's also stuff like the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which takes data from space. And then I didn't know how much intelligence is really done by private companies now. And this is a whole new industry kind of makes you want to be an entrepreneur in this industry. But Amy Zeger, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford, she wrote the book on the state of the universe. In intelligence right now it's called spies, lies in algorithms, the history and future of American intelligence. And it's the book to read. And listen about if you want to learn more about this. So I'm glad she's joining me through the podcast.
I've always been curious, why is there a CIA and FBI and NSA, a DIA, the Coast Guard, and all these other like weird intelligence agencies? There's now an intelligence agency, the Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which we'll find out about in a second. But I have with me, Amy Zegart? Who is a would you say you're a fellow at the Hoover Institute? Yeah. I'm a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. And she just wrote spies, lies and algorithms, the history and future of American intelligence. And so, Amy, why'd you write this book? Well, I relying on the spies.
Amy Zegart 1:57
Guess that's one way of putting it. I wrote it for two reasons. One was I wanted to have a book for my students. That was sort of intelligence one on one, the question you opened with, why do we have all these agencies? What do they do? Why do presidents use covert action even when they say they don't want to? And the second reason I wrote this book is I wanted to look at technology. And I call it the intelligence 2.0 mission of the book. How are emerging technologies like AI and commercial satellites, really transforming how our intelligence agencies do what they do? And what needs to be done to reform them? So two goals?
James Altucher 2:31
Yeah. And it seems like, you made me think about what reading this book made me think about spying and intelligence agencies in a different way. So it seems like there's three components worthy of being interested in one is, what is intelligence? Like? What is it? What does it mean to gather information that might may or may not be available about another country, or person or company or whatever. So that's intelligence gathering, then there's, as you just mentioned, there's covert actions. Somebody in a policy field, probably not an intelligence agency, uses an intelligence agency to take action in another country, like overthrow this government, or whatever, that's an extreme case, but do something covert. And then the third thing is, which has been a recent thing is technology, like using satellite data using social media using AI using cyber attacks and cybersecurity and stuff like that. So it feels like there's these these three different legs that this chair of intelligence sits on?
Amy Zegart 3:30
Absolutely. And so you know, you've hit on a really important distinction, which is, there's a part of intelligence that's about gathering information. So in its most simple form, intelligence is information that gives policymakers an advantage, right, any kind of advantage over our adversaries, right. So we know more faster, better about what may happen. So we can seize the, you know, the advantage, but then there's a part of the intelligence community that's trying to change outcomes, and that's through covert action. So the CIA is authorized by the by the president has to be authorized by the President to undertake covert action. But here's the interesting thing. You mentioned regime change or coups, right. Every covert action has an overt counterpart. So when it's a covert action, and we're trying to change a government, it's called, it's called a coup. When it's overt it's called a war. So covert action isn't some special bag of dirty tricks that the CIA does that nobody else does everything that what makes it covert, is that the US doesn't officially acknowledge its responsibility behind it.
James Altucher 4:32
But I guess they don't officially acknowledge their responsibility because it's somehow a little more evil. I'm not making a judgement, but like, why would they say it? Why would they make something covert for instance?
Amy Zegart 4:44
Ah, it's a great question. And it turns out there are real efficacy reasons why they do it. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We are in the Afghan mujahideen after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It was a covert action now the Soviets knew We were arming the Afghan mujahideen. And we knew that the Soviets knew. So why do we all pretend that it was secret? Because we didn't want an overt Cold War, a Cold War to turn hot. Right. So part of the reason why we claimed not to have official involvement is to keep things from escalating, because if the Soviets acknowledged that we were supporting the Afghan mujahideen, they would have been forced into a corner to maybe escalate or do something more significant. Second reason we did it. Third parties often want us to keep it quiet. So they help us so they don't get retaliation by an opponent. So in this case, there were the Pakistanis have helped us in Afghanistan, and some other countries, and they didn't want the world to know that they were helping us. And so it helps other countries help the United States by keeping it quiet.
James Altucher 5:44
And I guess also, there might be some situations where we're on both sides of the action,
Amy Zegart 5:50
that's possible to write so we don't know what's going to happen. And so there's some benefit into, you know, into into playing both sides.
James Altucher 5:58
Yeah, mate for either political reasons, or maybe even financial reasons, like during the Iran Iraq war, were we on both sides a little bit in the 80s?
Amy Zegart 6:06
Not so much on both sides, but we were mostly right in support of the Iraqis ever the Iranians in the Iran Iraq War. It's interesting, you know, yesterday's friends can be tomorrow's enemies.
James Altucher 6:15
And you address this also in the book, like, and we'll get into this. But, you know, and this causes a question the whole function of intelligence agencies, how often do we make major moves that are mistakes, and you bring up the example of, you know, in 1998, we were presented with evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and later realized it was a mistake. And obviously, we, you know, somehow or other we, we didn't do things right when we were arming them, Haji Deen, which became the Taliban and bin Laden and cause 911 Ultimately, even though we were originally helping them, so somehow, a lot of these actions kind of turned. They start with, let's call them good intentions, or at least perceived good intentions, but they they often don't end up that way.
Amy Zegart 7:05
Well, part of it. Let's take the Afghan mujahideen for example. Part of it is history works in mysterious ways. So it's hard to anticipate that arming the Mujahideen would end up morphing into al Qaeda and attacking the homeland. So if you rewound the tape, would we have armed the Mujahideen again? Probably yes, because at the time, it was a superpower conflict with the Soviet Union. But history has a way of playing out in unintended ways. And there's blowback to some intelligence for sure. But other kinds of failures, you know, analysis failures, like Iraqi WMD, like Pearl Harbor, like the Cuban missile crisis really come from often analysis failures. And you know, when I've done work on the intelligence community for a long time, and I'm always talking about failure, and I have to say that folks on the inside say, When are you ever going to talk about our successes? And what I say to them is, you know, your failures are public, but your successes you don't often talk about so we really don't know, the sort of scoresheet about what the CIA and other agencies got right and what they got wrong?
James Altucher 8:05
Well, well, okay, let's let's, let's talk about this. What are some successes that we do know about or that you know about?
Amy Zegart 8:11
Well, I think the one that the public knows the most about, and his most recent is the hunt for Osama bin Laden, right, a 10 year manhunt to find a guy who was doing everything he could to hide, it's actually a remarkable story. And in order to find him, intelligence officials had to throw out all the assumptions they had about how he was hiding, which is how he had always hidden in the past, so Bin Ladin throughout the rulebook of how he used to hide, he hid in a city not in a rural area, he hid without lots of security, he used to have lots of security he had with his family members, he never did that before. And so to actually find this guy after 10 years of hunting him was a remarkable intelligence success.
James Altucher 8:52
Well, you know, it's interesting, because I had a several years ago, I had on a former CIA or some three letter agency, agent, or Spire, whatever you call it, on the podcast, and he wasn't involved at all in the bin Laden operation. And he wasn't with any agency at the moment or so he said, but he was of the opinion that because the rulebook had been because it was so obvious that the rulebook had been thrown out and the way bin Laden was hiding himself and he, he was also on the living on the third floor of this building. And or the second, you know, he didn't have easy exits, just in case there was an emergency. He kind of thought that the real story and this I know intelligence agency stories border always on conspiracy stories, and I don't want to go that direction, necessarily. But he thought that maybe bin Laden was actually a prisoner, and they decided that as used as a prisoner was no no longer needed, and did this operation as a way of cleaning it up. Do you think this has any credibility?
Amy Zegart 9:54
No, no, I don't think so at all, I mean, based on what's been publicly released, and there's a lot that's been declassified related to this operation. No way. There's no way the US intelligence community kept him as a prisoner, instead of getting him and us. And, you know, he had a treasure trove of information when the SEAL team went in there that was mined for its intelligence value, there is no way that that they would have kept him there and not exploited the intelligence value and brought him to justice after 911. None.
James Altucher 10:23
Why do you think they didn't try to bring him to justice, like, arrest him and bring him in? Because he is intelligence value probably was even greater if we, you know, imprisoned him somewhere?
Amy Zegart 10:34
Look, the operation from what we know, wasn't enough, wasn't a killing operation, it was let's try to bring him in. I mean, you know, our SEAL team members were fired on when they when they went into the compound. And so it all went down fast. And they and they killed him in the course of the raid, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion at all. Okay.
James Altucher 10:53
And then, you know, after 911, I'd like to think, and I heard just different rumors on this. But I'd like to think that intelligence agencies were very active and stopping the next five, nine elevens. For all we know, do you know of any, you know, if that is true?
Amy Zegart 11:09
Well, you know, I can I can talk about the things that have been publicly reported. So I'd be careful here. But we know, in 2006, there was a transatlantic bombing plot, right? You know how when you go to the airport, you have to put all of your toiletries in those little bottles in the little bags, that that came from that plot, which was that's, that's how the explosives were going to be put on board airplanes coming from Europe to the United States. And so intelligence actually prevented that plot from materializing. And that was definitely a major victory after 911. So that's one that sort of immediately comes to mind. I think another just to harp on successes for a minute. You know, successes are often non events, right events that don't happen. And one was, you know, Qaddafi actually gave up his nuclear weapons program. He gave it up, right? He was developing nuclear weapons, and he gave it up. And how did he give it up, the CIA played a huge role in developing the intelligence about what he had, and actually working with the government to negotiate with him to give up his WMD program.
James Altucher 12:12
This is very interesting, because I have a bunch of naive questions that I've always been curious about that I'd like to ask, and then get into kind of a deeper content in the book. But some of these questions might segue into that as well. And the second question won't be related to Khadafi. The first one is, I had a friend who worked for the CIA for a while, and he rose up and rose up and rose up. And then at one point, they asked him, hey, we want to send you now on an international operation, and you're going to take on an identity, you won't be able to talk to your family for at least five years. Are you okay with that? And so he had to leave the agency, because he wasn't okay with that. But does that, does that sort of thing happen? I mean, I trust my friend, like it definitely happened to him. But is that a frequent thing? Like, what is that all about? How are you not supposed to talk to your family?
Amy Zegart 13:01
Well, so the so the agency really does leave some discretion to intelligence officers about when they tell their kids and their spouses what they do. So let me back up, they're two parts, really two major parts of the CIA. One is the Directorate of Intelligence, which is analysts, right. So these are, these are, this is not Jack Ryan going into the field, right, with a gun, these are what I want to do. So, so these are these are the the people who are putting the pieces together. And then the other side of the agency is a directorate of operations. And those are the folks that are engaged in covert action that are engaged in paramilitary activities, and that are engaged in recruiting human assets on the ground to betray their country secrets to help the United States. So they're not spies, they recruit spies. So the spies are the foreigners. They're the intelligence officers that run those spies and meet with them to find out what they know. So when you're talking about going undercover, and not telling your family that's a small subset of intelligence officers that work in different intelligence agencies, and the extent to which they can tell or not tell their families is really driven by the mission. And so one of the things I did in this book is I asked a bunch of folks inside the intelligence community questions like, how did your kids react when you told them what you did? When what made you decide to tell how old were they questions that I think most people actually really want to know. And the answers I got, were kind of all over the place. So I had one intelligence officer who told me that he had death threats against his family when he was posted overseas. He was a case officer, he was, you know, recruiting people in a foreign country. And he had to tell his little kids how to look on the street to notice whether anything was different today was the guy on the street corner selling popsicles, the same guy that was on the street corner before, like they had to learn how to keep themselves safe because of his job. That was a pretty powerful story.
James Altucher 14:57
What was there ever a situation where things really weren't there? and they had to do something.
Amy Zegart 15:03
Not that he told me. So in this case, I think the threat passed. And he moved, you know, he moved assignments and everything was fine. But he had to tell his kids at a pretty young age, what he really did. And his oldest son, who We then talked to, after we did this interview said, Yeah, I remember thinking what you did was cool.
James Altucher 15:20
I think that's why I would want to tell everybody, but I guess that's probably why they were doing recruitment that would make you a bad at your job. Exactly. So so like, in this case, with my friend, again, he wouldn't tell me what he was doing or what he was asked to do. Other than that, that was the reason he left was that he, he felt in order to rise further, he had to take this, this role. And he didn't want to not have to see his family for so long has, in particular, his parents, so he wasn't married at the time. But what type of thing would would he be sent abroad to do that it would be so secretive, he couldn't talk to his family for that amount of time.
Amy Zegart 15:56
I mean, it really varies. And when you think about some of the most secretive sort of assignments that that you can imagine, it's what's called non official cover. So you're going, you know, pretending to be someone, you have a cover, where you're not officially working for the US government. So a lot of intelligence officials are working out of US embassies, and they have official cover, which is to say they work for the Department of Agriculture or some other government agency, non official cover means you really have a different background. And you're not protected by diplomatic immunity, either. Right? So if you're an intelligence officer, and let's say you're in a spy versus spy game, and the ground in Moscow, and the Russians find out about something you're doing, you get deported, right, you get kicked out of the country, that this is how this game works right up how it worked in the Cold War, it's how it works, now you get deported. But if you're under non official cover, the stakes are much higher. And if you get caught, there may not be anything that the government can do to help you. So those tend to be very sort of deep cover assignments that require more secrecy. But in general, if you have a security clearance, you can't tell your significant other what you're doing in your day job. They say How was work today? Honey, you just say fine, right? You can't you can't reveal what you're doing. Because you took an oath of office that if you do, you're going to reveal secrets that could hurt national security.
James Altucher 17:10
I mean, I guess what we do know is when other countries spy on us, and we catch them, we sort of get a little window into how these other intelligence agencies work. And you know, there's the famous case, and you mentioned this, Jonathan Pollard, who was working for Israel, which is an ally of us, but he was also spying on us. But you also mentioned other countries like France. They've been caught spying on us, like, what? Why would France spy on us? And what did they get from us?
Amy Zegart 17:37
So almost all countries spy on each other. So the number of countries that actually have a, you know, a handshake agreement that they're actually not going to spy on each other is very, very small. And the US, it's really, we have a very strong working relationship with what's called the Five Eyes. It's a great phrase. It's the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. So we work very closely together with those countries intelligence services, but for everybody else, spine is fair game, what can they get from us? They want to understand what US policy is going to be toward? Imagine, what is President Biden thinking about what the US will do if Russia invades Ukraine? Right? What is likely action that we could take if China moves on Taiwan, or if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, so our allies want to know what the US government is likely to do? Or what our interests are likely to be? What the policy debates are, and we want to know what they're thinking too, before an international negotiation, or on a big issue.
James Altucher 18:36
So what are the the layers of that like, for instance, the first layer might just be, Hey, someone in Paris, reads our newspapers every day and read some blogs from ex government people and then collects all this information and forms an opinion and submits it to his boss. So let's say that's layer one. How, what are other layers? And how deep do the layers go?
Amy Zegart 19:00
Well, so this world that you just described, is changing pretty dramatically, thanks to technology. So it used to be that secrets, were sort of the foundational layer, and then you'd sprinkle that other stuff on top. And that other stuff would be news reports, things that are publicly available, what people call open source intelligence, it used to be the add on the icing on the top. Now, it's been reversed. Because if you think about what's publicly available today, that anyone can get their hands on. Right, so we talked about the bin Laden operation, the Pakistani military didn't see us forces coming in that operation. But a local guy did. He heard strange noises outside his bedroom window, and he live tweeted the entire Bin Laden operation. So think about what you can get just by following Twitter that you couldn't get 10 or 20 years ago. So even
James Altucher 19:51
more now because like, like the kind of satellite imagery you get from Google satellite, for instance, is probably what the US the quality of the US government. was getting 10 or 15 years ago now is for the consumer.
Amy Zegart 20:03
Absolutely. And it's cheap and sometimes free. And so anybody can get this kind of information. So this kind of open source intelligence is now becoming foundational to thinking about how we how we get insight about threats that's completely different than it was sort of 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
James Altucher 20:20
Right. So So what would be like the next layer? Would you try to go to embassy parties and pretend you're with your the French Embassy and just kind of get drunk with people working for the White House and see what happens?
Amy Zegart 20:33
Well, that's one strategy. They're certainly certainly part of it. So I think intelligence folks think about, they're called ince or intelligence disciplines. And intelligence works best when they all come together. So you don't want to rely on just one. So they're human sources that might get drunk at Embassy cocktail parties and try to pry secrets out of their Russian counterparts, for example. So there's human intelligence on the ground. But there's also signals intelligence. So foreign intercepts of phone calls, right, or emails that are transiting abroad. And I mentioned the word foreign, because many Americans mistakenly believe the NSA is eavesdropping on their phone calls with grandma, they're not doing that they they train their eavesdropping abroad. So their signals intelligence, there's intelligence that you can get from satellites, not just what you see. But radio frequency emissions that can enable you to detect ships at sea that have turned their transponders off, because their radar and their radio equipment actually gives them away, we can detect that with satellites and their RF transmissions from space. So there's that kind of intelligence too. And then there's all the open source intelligence, like what you're posting on social media, selfies, and all sorts of data that's just out there for anybody to use.
James Altucher 21:45
So when you get into kind of intercepting, let's say, foreign conversations, like, how does that work? So let's say someone want to intercept, you know, the phone conversation of someone working for Biden, who's making making a call, what would they do?
Amy Zegart 22:02
Well, I know technically what they would do, because our communication systems are pretty secure. And we have a lot of people working hard to keep them that way. It's why you know, you're not allowed just to bring your cell phone into the White House or your cell phone into the CIA, they make you leave it at the door, right or anything, anything that sort of a connected device, like your Fitbit can't take inside. So very, that's counterintelligence, right preventing the other guys from penetrating your stuff. But what you want to do is not just intercept the conversation, because imagine someone's intercepting our conversation right now. They might get the words that we're saying to each other, but they don't know the context in which we're saying them. So they would need to know much more about who are you who am I? What are we talking about? What is this book? What's your interest in interviewing me, they need that context to be able to calibrate the conversation that they've just eavesdropped on. So it's not enough just to get those so called smoking, gun communication, the recording of somebody, it takes a lot more digging a lot more analysis to understand, well, what does it mean?
James Altucher 23:03
Right, so but let's say, you know, I'll say I'm like, I'm the Russian intelligence agency, and I know somebody as regular meetings with people close to Biden, about the Ukraine. So I want to get his conversations. And let's say he uses his cell phone at home, and I pick up these conversations, you know, obviously, this is this is, now we're sort of not just bordering on illegally, I'm going to do an illegal activity, I'm going to get this guy's phone conversation, is it even possible to do or what do they do to kind of really dig in and get secrets?
Amy Zegart 23:39
Who do you mean by that? Do you mean a Foreign Intelligence Service,
James Altucher 23:41
foreign intelligence agency? Well, by by and by that I mean, also us in a foreign area, just here, I understand the context better, because it's about Biden, how you'd respond to the Ukraine. So let's say I'm the Russia intelligence agency.
Amy Zegart 23:54
So intelligence agencies don't care about violating the laws of the countries that they're operating in. So for the Russians, they don't care about breaking US law, they don't want to get caught. But they're not worried about breaking the law. And the same thing, US intelligence agencies operating abroad are following us law. But they may be violating the laws of the countries where they're operating. And that's considered fair game in the world of espionage. So, so that's sort of the underlying sort of rules of the road of how they operate.
James Altucher 24:21
But at some, like at that foundational layer, where it's a kind of this open source intelligence, there's no laws being broken. And you can get pretty far with that. But at some point, you have to like go over the line and start intercepting stuff illegally in that country. And I'm just curious, how much does that happen? Like, does the White House have nonstop radio waves hitting it from from foreign countries trying to hear what's going on?
Amy Zegart 24:47
Oh, well, you know, it's been publicly reported that the Pentagon and other US national security agencies have millions of attempted cyber intrusions a day It's constantly when you think about what's available in cyberspace. And we keep talking about like, what is war look like we are at war in cyberspace, it is occurring every day. adversaries are trying to penetrate American systems every day, we just don't hear about in the news all the time.
James Altucher 25:17
And to what extent do they succeed? Or what percentage succeeds? Well, too
Amy Zegart 25:20
much succeeds, right? So we saw SolarWinds, which was in the news in December, this is the Russian attributed to Russia hack that put malware into the SolarWinds updates, which affected 1000s of companies in at least nine US government agencies that we know of, and the one of the scary parts about SolarWinds. There are many scary things about SolarWinds. But number one, it wasn't detected for a long time, right? So often, it's like that nightmare movie where the bad guy is inside the house the whole time, but you didn't know it. That's what's happening in cyberspace. And it was detected by private sector cybersecurity firm, the government didn't even detect it. Right. So it was a third party that detected it, which suggests, you know, these cyber adversaries are very adept.
James Altucher 26:05
What do they detect?
Amy Zegart 26:08
They detect it Well, in this case, it was FireEye, which discovered that its own cyber prevention tools have been compromised. And that sort of led them on the breadcrumbs that unravel, that lead down the trail
James Altucher 26:21
of overwhelm. For all we know, there are dozens or hundreds or 1000s of, you know, operations in place now that are working, where they're picking up our conversations and listening and so on.
Amy Zegart 26:32
It's possible, the question is, you know, what's the intention of an adversary and what's their capability? So I, you know, most adversaries aren't going to get a lot by listening to my phone calls, right? There's no reason for them to really do that. So you know, everyday Americans are generally not targets of these kinds of things. And then a lot of countries or or organizations that have the intention to do that kind of thing, say non state actors don't have the capability to pull that off. Sometimes it takes a really sophisticated operation to penetrate these not always, but but often it does. So it has to be a marriage of intention and capability for these attacks to to be pulled off.
James Altucher 27:11
You know, I was reading recently about and you have a great chapter about cybersecurity, and what is a cyber threat? What is there? Is there a notion of, you know, how, like in the 80s, there was mutual assured destruction, nobody was gonna drop a nuclear bomb, and anyone because of this idea that if you drop one, then the whole world is going to get nuked. So it was this mutual assured destruction implicit policy. And I read recently, there's something kind of similar with cybersecurity, that if we just shut down Russia, or China, they probably have the capability to do the same thing to us. Like if we just shut the electric grid of China completely down. They could probably do it to us. Do you think our capabilities and their capabilities are that sophisticated?
Amy Zegart 27:53
I mean, I'm not on the inside to know exactly what our capabilities are, but from what people on the inside have told me, where are the most sophisticated cyber actor in the world, but and this is what you alluded to, we're also one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. So one of the things that makes cyber so vexing, is that power doesn't protect us like it does in physical space. Right? So it used to be if you had bigger armies with better forces, you were more protected from the bad guys. And geography protected you too. But in cyberspace, that's not true. We're incredibly powerful in cyberspace, but we're vulnerable, because we're so digitally connected. So when North Korea hacked Sony Pictures because of that movie, the interview, the Seth Rogen comedy, right, it became a national security incident. But when North Korea's internet went down, and it did shortly thereafter, maybe because of something the US did. Nothing happened because North Korea only had 28 websites, right? So North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world. That's why we're much more vulnerable in cyberspace than some of our adversaries are. How do they get
James Altucher 29:00
good at cybersecurity? Like how could they hack anything? They never leave their country?
Amy Zegart 29:06
No, they have remarkable technical capabilities in nuclear weapons, cybersecurity and stealing cryptocurrency, go figure.
James Altucher 29:15
I guess they send some kids abroad for school, they threaten their families, if the kids don't come back. And kids get training, you know, the best of the best get training and then they go back to North Korea.
Amy Zegart 29:26
They're also in the in the wild west of cyberspace. There are all sorts of guns for hire, right? There are cyber proxies, you can mean there's a whole ecosystem of businesses where you can, you know, get people to write you malware and send you what are called Zero Day vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities in code that the developers don't know you can buy them on the black market. So there is a whole sort of dark commerce system for nefarious activities in cyberspace.
James Altucher 29:53
And what part of the US intelligence services is trying to monitor those blocks markets.
Amy Zegart 30:01
So there are a number of different parts of our intelligence community that do that. One of the most interesting parts of it is, you know, the National Security Agency is dual hat, it is what it's called the head of the National Security Agency, which right collects foreign signals intelligence is also the head of United States Cyber Command. That's the military command that's responsible for defending and attacking in cyberspace. So you can see there is a tight connection between our ability to gather information, and to use it to defend ourselves and to wage offensive cyber operations. So they're very attuned to what's going on in cyberspace. But they're not the only ones in the intelligence community doing this kind of, you know, sort of understanding what cyber capabilities there are.
James Altucher 30:48
I mean, I guess would they would they set up like fake black market companies to and see who the customers are, like, be legit for a long time. And then when North Korea shows up and says, We want to shut down the US electric grid, that's when they jump into action.
Amy Zegart 31:03
Potentially, I mean, in private companies, too, can do a lot of things to protect themselves, they can create, you know, documents and things that look very attractive, that are actually fake, to lure the bad guys into stealing the wrong stuff. So it's not just defending you can use deception if you're a private company to protect yourself as well. So there are a number of things that you know, one of the things about cyberspace is that the government doesn't protect us in the way that we expect the government to protect us in the physical world, right? If we have a break in in our neighborhood, we call the police. If someone is invading with tanks in our country we call the military. But who's protecting you and me from cyber attack from a right who's protecting big companies from cyber attacks? It's not really clear, that's a huge problem that the government's trying to figure out how to work its way through.
James Altucher 31:50
Wow. And how do you think they'll figure it out?
Amy Zegart 31:53
I think what we're seeing in the Biden administration is a move toward having the Department of Homeland Security play a much bigger role. So if you've seen these public service announcements about there's a huge vulnerability in you know, fill in the blank, you need to patch your Microsoft Office today. That's often coming from an organization called Sissa, which is in the Department of Homeland Security. They're working much more closely with the private sector in the public about prevention, defense and response in cybersecurity. But just to give you some sense of you know, how much room we have to improve. There are, I think, roughly 10 times more people that are National Park Service employees protecting our nation's parks than there are people employed in this One Agency and the Department of Homeland Security that's trying to protect our companies and people from cyber attacks. So we have a long way to go Harkes.
James Altucher 32:49
We got to, we got to stop being hacked.
You know, this relates a little bit like the NSA stuff relates a lot to what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA, you know, he revealed a lot of people that had never even heard of the NSA when Snowden released all his documentation about what the NSA does, and so on. But I have a question about that. Like, I remember when I was a kid, there was this book, The puzzle Palace, I think was written in 1977, about the NSA. And it said all the things that Snowden said, like why was this all a surprise to people what Snowden released?
Amy Zegart 33:35
So I think there are two parts to that. One is that the specifics that Snowden released were about very sensitive, highly classified, and relatively new programs after 911 that were not publicly known before. So some of what he revealed in terms of the specific programs were both incredibly damaging, and surprising to people who weren't read into the programs and weren't clear to hear the programs. But the second piece of that is why don't people know about the NSA, more generally, the puzzle Palace is a great book. There have been some other terrific books written about the national security agency. The agency in general is one of the most secretive of the US intelligence agencies. In fact, the NSA used the joke is it stood for No Such Agency because the government didn't even acknowledge it existed for a long time. And I think that came back to bite them after 911. They held so much secret that when some of these programs by Edward Snowden were revealed, it generated scandal and controversy had the NSA actually said, you know, we want to do some different programs that are looking at transmissions between domestic and foreign terrorists. I think they would have gotten more public support. And I think they wouldn't have been engaged in such a tremendous scandal as they were.
James Altucher 34:49
What's What's the the link between the private sector and the intelligence sector? So I'm thinking more maybe historically In the 50s, or 60s, it seems like if you were an executive at a big corporation, and you happen to be, you know, working out of Warsaw or, you know, Vienna or something, there was a decent chance or some chance that you could also be an intelligence official, also working for like an RCA or a Raytheon or whoever. Do you think there was a big linkage between the private sector and intelligence? I think in
Amy Zegart 35:25
some cases, we know there was right so one of my favorite real life examples from history is this incredible operation called Azorean, which was, there was a Soviet nuclear submarine that mysteriously sank in the Pacific. And the CIA has now been declassified launched a covert operation to retrieve this sunken submarine, and as nuclear secrets really important in the Cold War, without the Soviet Union knowing it, and how are they going to do this. And so it was, it's an incredible story. And one of the people who was played a pivotal role in this operation was Howard Hughes, so a private businessman, and so he was the front. So he had this deep sea mining vessel called the Hughes Glomar. Explorer. That was, in fact, not a deep sea mining vessel, but a custom made vessel designed for hauling this Soviet nuclear submarine off the ocean floor, which had never been done before. So it's a great example of how a private citizen actually played a really important role in a covert operation. So there, there have always been these sorts of connections between the private sector and the intelligence community. But now what's happened because of technology being so important in the world, companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter, and high tech startups that are generating new discoveries in AI and quantum computing, they have to coordinate more and interact more with the intelligence community because the intelligence meeting needs their innovations in order to do their jobs better. So they have to have a better working relationship today.
James Altucher 37:00
Like, how does that work? So does it let's say, the CIA wants some information, they call Google and say, Hey, this is what we need, we need to see everything. You know, Putin is googling today. And this is Google. What can what can Google provide? What does Google provide? Like? What information does Google have that that intelligence agencies don't? Obviously they have a lot of information? And then to what extent do they use AI as well to parse through this information?
Amy Zegart 37:30
So each agency is different? And those relationships are really determined by number one? What are they legally required to provide? Right? So some companies don't want to do anything more than the bare legal minimum? depends on the company? And second, what is their what's the issue involved. So if it's about things like sex trafficking of children, right, a lot easier to get every company to participate in giving information for look to law enforcement to help prevent that. So but you know, these companies have different incentives and different interests at play. So in the case of Google, for example, they have global markets, they have global customers, they have global investors, they have global employees. So there are reasons why they're not just going to open the doors and say US government come on in and take whatever data of ours that you want, they're not going to do that. And they have some understandable reasons why they're not going to do that. Imagine if they had to do that for every country in the world to right, where China is now saying, You need to give us all the information you have on dissidents that have Gmail accounts, for example. So it's a delicate relationship, the cooperative relationship between intelligence agencies, and these private sector firms. Some of its done in public, a lot of it is done quietly and in private.
James Altucher 38:46
But like, what does Google have like? What can someone get from Google if you're an intelligence agency?
Amy Zegart 38:52
Well, I mean, I think it's, you know, you can you can see it pretty easily. If you, you know, search for things that you want to buy, for example, if you have a birthday coming up, and you're, and you're searching for something, what does Google know about you? Google knows a lot about you. Google knows your internet browsing history. They know how long you spend on each website, they know what you like to buy, where you shop, what you spend your free time doing, where you get your news, how long you're spending reading silly stories in US Weekly versus the New York Times or other places, they may know where your phone is, right tracking your cell phone location, they may know, based on your Google searches that you might be pregnant, right, which no one else may know. But based on your Google search history, you can piece that together. So all of this, what they call metadata about how we use and I'm sure we're singling out Google, but other companies have this capability to all the things that make you attractive to target advertisements to you. That's because of all the data that these companies are trafficking in about your life. Google knows a lot more about me than the National Security Agency does. I can guarantee you that. So and it's amazing how their algorithms pop up things for you based on your search history? Right? So, you know, in my case, I get a lot of shoe ads, right? How does Google know that they should send me that shoe ad based on my history. So and in some cases, I have a family member who, after the Capitol riot and insurrection On January, the six, really wanted to learn what happened, and started doing deep dive research on Google about what happened. And by the end of a 24 hour period, he was getting targeted ads for body armor, because the algorithms thought he was a right wing extremists that wanted to protest against his government one day.
James Altucher 40:38
So. So let's say let's say the CIA calls up and say, Listen, we think so and so's a terrorist. We want to know what you think Google? Can you give us an update on this person? Does Google know Does Google respond?
Amy Zegart 40:54
I mean, I hate to say it depends, but it does depend. So the if the FBI would be the agency, right, that would most likely be contacting Google. And there would be, it might be a law enforcement approach to the company, right? So we have reason to believe we have to have, you can't just go on a fishing expedition, give us whatever you have Google on Americans, who might have said something that is concerning, because that then violates the First Amendment. So it really is very context specific. What the ask is what the laws say Google has to provide, and what a company like Google would be willing and able to do.
James Altucher 41:33
But I feel like, it's interesting, because I feel like you know, as you mentioned, we have the power now to be our own intelligence agencies really like Google, like you say, knows more about people than intelligence services. So would it ever be and again, Google and quotes, like you said, there could be many other companies? But would there ever be a time when Google proactively says, look, here's our monthly list of who we think are the top 10 candidates to be terrorists? Here it is?
Amy Zegart 41:59
Well, I mean, we do see proactive work on the part of private sector companies. So in the case of the 2016, Russian election, interference campaign, how do we know that Russians were masquerading as Americans on Facebook? Facebook, right, the US intelligence community didn't detect it. They didn't go to Facebook and say, hey, you've got a problem on your platform. These are Russians based in St. Petersburg on these Facebook accounts, not Americans, Facebook, found that information themselves proactively found it and brought it to the intelligence community. So it does. I mean, there are instances and I think, you know, these large companies have more capability to do that kind of work than small companies, where they are trying to be proactive about identifying dangerous organizations, I think Facebook does this YouTube does this, Google does it not as well as they should, not as well as the nation needs. But they are proactive about it. And they do identify, particularly if it's an imminent terrorist threat, identify if there are things that are of great concern for them, or Russian interference in an election, for example.
James Altucher 43:03
And like you said earlier, we don't really know the events that didn't happen because they were stopped. But do you think there was ever a time when one of these big companies were able to stop a major event? Because they informed intelligence agencies of emails they saw going through and AI help them analyze, you know, what were relevant emails and so on?
Amy Zegart 43:22
I mean, I really couldn't speculate about whether it's ever happened or not. I wouldn't be surprised if it has.
James Altucher 43:29
And so, I mean, what when you were when you were writing this, like, what surprised you about our intelligence agencies, what was interesting to me was their poor ability on forecasting. And you have this section on Philip, Philip Tetlock, who is known, well known for his research on people's ability to forecast is basically nil without some training, but it turns out that applies not only to people on CNBC, but it also applies to intelligence officials. Right?
Amy Zegart 43:58
So I think, you know, one of that. So you've hit on one of the surprising things, which is how much intelligence failures really stem from basic forecasting weaknesses that all humans have. So the biases we have, you know, I was just talking about the Super Bowl, right? How am I going to predict the winner? I'm completely biased, right? I'm going to pick the Bengals to win because I have optimism bias that the Bengals are going to win. Are you from Cincinnati? I mean, I grew up in Kentucky. So the closest NFL team was the Bengals and I would go to some of the games. But optimism bias affects intelligence officials to one of the things that I one of my sort of favorite biases that I find fascinating is something called the availability bias probably know this well. And this is that we tend to think things that we can frequently that we can remember really well are more likely to happen in the future. So why are Americans so freaked out about shark attacks, even though you're more likely to die by a car accident 60,000 times more likely to die by car accident that shark attack because the media is obsessed with Shark attacks. And so we can easily remember a story about shark attacks. So we mistake the probability of a shark attack in the future, based on our ability to remember it. This kind of thing affects intelligence analysis a lot, too. So I'll give you an example, a concrete example. In the hunt for Bin Ladin, there's this famous meeting of intelligence officials and President Obama and it goes around the room. And he says, we have this intelligence if there's this guy called the Pacer in a compound in Pakistan. What do you think the odds are? That the Pacer right? They have no DNA evidence? They have no physical sighting of him? What do you think the odds are that it's been Loddon? It goes around the room. And the estimates range from 40%, that it's been locked in to 95%. That it's been lauded. These are all smart people, they've all read the exact same intelligence information. But the range went from 40 to 95%. Why? availability bias, right. So they were counting their probability estimates 40% or 95%. Based on their recent experience, people who had more recently come off intelligence counterterrorism successes, tended to have a higher estimate that they were going to be right within Ladin, people who had lived through Iraq WMD. And the intelligence failure that that constituted, were at the lower end of that spectrum of probability estimates. So so we live, we're all human. And we have human mistakes in our brain wiring. And that affects intelligence analysis, too.
James Altucher 46:35
So as these technolon it, we've been hearing this discussion more and more into the technology, because it seems like human operations, while they're kind of the stuff of which movies are made, what's happening now, like you say, we're at war right now, because of cyber attacks, and cyber security, and so on. A lot more of this is heading into technology, as well as satellite imagery and the sophistication of that and AI and its ability to analyze, like, trillions of bits of data that in ways that humans can't. So the future seems scary, because you can't really stop this. You know, let's say some little, let's say, Russia can shut down our electric grid if they want. Now, it'll soon be the case that every school kid will probably be able to shut down our electric kid, you know, from all around the world. And maybe, yes, maybe no, but some cataclysmic event could potentially be done by someone relatively irrelevant, just because of advances in technology. And how these advances are not distributed evenly, like an advance could happen in China. That doesn't happen here. And so they'll be capable of doing something that we're not even aware of, like, to what extent are we just doomed right now?
Amy Zegart 47:49
Well, I try to be optimistic. I think that with all technology, there's promise and new technology. And there's peril, and new technology, that's always been the case, right? So cars transformed our economy, they also enable new kinds of theft, right armed robbery with cars that are getaway cars, gave rise to the FBI, right. So there's always a dark side and a positive side to any new technology. When you think about AI, for example, imagine the medical breakthroughs we could have, with artificial intelligence being able to develop, for example, a new antibiotic, which happened just a few years ago, faster and better than humans could, being able to piece together different parts of data so that you know, early whether you have a fatal disease that you would never have known before, because of these micro pieces of data, that together actually a really good indicator. So I think there's real promise for breakthroughs in health, breakthroughs and productivity in sort of the human condition or economy or global economy. But there is a dark side to AI as well. And when I think about what that dark side is, I'm really worried about crisis management. So think about crises that we've lived through in our lives and how hard it is for humans to manage them, when they know the other side is a human. Now imagine that the other side is using AI to help them make decisions that we won't anticipate. That's when things start to get really hairy and crises can spiral out of control. So we nearly went to nuclear war in 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that was Kennedy talking to Khrushchev without AI. Now imagine machines have a greater role in this kind of decision making and automatic firing and all and all the rest of it. It makes crisis management much more fraught, I think than it has in the past. So I you know, I catastrophize for a living that's kind of I think about scary things all day. But at the end of the day, I think technology can help get us out of the problems that it's also getting us into.
James Altucher 49:54
Right but I always I remember visiting a cybersecurity once about a decade. Go. And they were trying to prevent bought armies from invading corporations, they would they would set up software for corporations so they wouldn't get, you know, invaded by these bot armies coming from other countries or other companies or whatever. And one thing they said to me was, is that the bad guys are always going to be better than us. You know, because they're, it's it's one thing. You know, people say the best defense is a good offense. But the people who are truly offensive are probably better at offense than we are. We're just trying to defend. Mostly,
Amy Zegart 50:33
I agree. And you know, there's the old saying, right, the bad guys don't only have to be successful once we have to be successful every time when you're playing defense. So I think you got to change the game, when offense has the you know, is favored, you have to change the game or in. And the way you change the game is yes, you have to defend as well as you can. But you have to be able to be resilient. So even if they get through, are they going to steal the crown jewels that you have in your company, or your organization, your agency. And even if they do that, or they take down the grid? Do we have backup systems that aren't connected to those primary systems so that we can rebound and recover more quickly and ably than we could before. So resilience is about bouncing back after an attack, not preventing every attack from getting through. And I think we have to have a different mindset about how to think about our cyber effective effectiveness in cyber attacks, the bad guys will get through. The question is how do you operate while you're infected? How do you operate after you've been attacked? And how do you recover quickly?
James Altucher 51:34
And, you know, you mentioned this new agency that set up with just with the geospatial imagery. So satellites are an important part of this now, too, like satellites, could practically see right into your home, like, what's the future of that?
Amy Zegart 51:47
So the satellite revolution is amazing. So it used to be in the Cold War, that really only superpowers could launch billion dollar spy satellites, and they were about the size of a bus. Now you're talking about hundreds of 1000s of dollars, and satellites are the size of a loaf of bread. And so what does that mean? Well, the new capabilities with commercial satellites really come into sort of four different buckets. One is there more of them. And if they're more satellites, it means they can fly around orbit faster every day. So you can get revisit rates over the same territory, multiple times a day. So if I want to know, I think there's a terrorist training camp, right, somewhere in Syria, I can get almost a moving picture in the course of a day because the satellites are flying over it so frequently. So think instead of one snapshot, every few weeks, I get a moving picture in the course of 24 hours. So frequency, big difference with commercial satellites today, which gives you a dynamic view of changes in the world, including, like climate change, for example. The second real advantage is resolution. So you mentioned you can see stuff, like very small items. Now, there's a commercial satellite that offers resolution so sharp, you can see the signs on the runways of an airport from space. Right? That's incredible, right, you can detect different types of cars from space. So resolution is a really vast improvement over what it was even 15 years ago. And then there's something I'm going to get a little geeky here for a minute, because I've just been learning about this stuff is, you know, what's the sort of spectrum? So we talked about what you can see, like, what's a picture, but there's also infrared. And there are radio frequencies that give you visibility into all sorts of other things that people are trying to keep secret that are now visible, because you can detect them from space. So I mean, we know infrared from the movies, right? So you have your your infrared signatures. So even if it's not in the visible spectrum, satellites can detect all sorts of things from space, and put this all together, and you have this sort of treasure trove of new data that anybody can use.
James Altucher 54:04
Yeah, it's and again, it seems like not only the intelligence agencies could use a lot of this data, but anybody can some of this data is very publicly available. And and you do see, like, I don't know, if you're familiar with a company, like strat for, for instance, you do see these, like companies that are set up to be almost like many, you know, commercial intelligence agencies that people can subscribe to, to see what's going on in the world. And how accurate or even better are those companies? I mean, it feels like there's entrepreneurial opportunities right now, in the intelligence space with so much data available.
Amy Zegart 54:37
There are huge opportunities in this space. And, you know, again, it's classified, but what from what I understand that spy satellites still have greater capability than commercial satellites. But that gap is really narrowing. And so you have a number of companies that are producing not just the raw data, but analysis of that data. So you know, the National Reconnaissance Office is paying hundreds of millions dollars a year for information coming from commercial satellite companies. And so I think there's a recognition that the government doesn't have to do it alone and can't do it alone. And there are all these other companies out there that are gathering data that can be incredibly useful. Here's another example that recently came to light. So a few months ago, there was a story in the Washington Post. And it's been carried elsewhere about the discovery of hundreds of Chinese nuclear missile silos previously unknown, or at least acknowledged by the Chinese. How are they discovered? Non Governmental researchers using commercially available technology, open source intelligence, revealing the existence of these set of these ICBM silos?
James Altucher 55:43
What did they do to identify them?
Amy Zegart 55:46
So looking at patterns, I mean, one of the things is, you know, government organizations have standard operating procedures, which means that silos are usually built in the same way, right? Because there are efficiencies if your silo always has the same kind of fencing around it, or has the same kind of land leveling, or has the same kind of design. And so because government organizations, like organizations like to do things in standard operating ways, you can hunt for things like that. So there are signatures that you look for what does a silo field look like? Well, there are other silo fields that were known. So when there was commercial satellite imagery over particular areas of China, it was detected by people who spend a lot of time there, they're pretty avid these nuclear detectives, looking for evidence of is there something new going on here? And they found it?
James Altucher 56:36
And and I guess, related to this, what do you see as the role of crypto and intelligence agencies like right now, it seems like let's say you used to pay off warlords with cash now, you'd have to carry that cash to whatever country you're paying people off. Now you could just transfer crypto nobody knows about it, because of the privacy aspects of cryptocurrencies.
Amy Zegart 56:57
So crypto works both for the good guys and the bad guys. Right? So it's not a surprise. North Korea likes cryptocurrency a lot, too. They like to steal it, they like to use it. A lot of bad guys like cryptocurrencies, not just good guy investors. So it works both ways. And we've seen also recently with Colonial Pipeline, that just because someone's using cryptocurrency, doesn't mean that they're totally anonymous, there are points in the process where others can figure out who you are, right? When you convert that crypto to real money, there's a possibility for others to find out who you are. So it's not as failsafe as people think it is and hiding their identity.
James Altucher 57:35
Right. But it's, it's probably a good way, though, it's probably better than cash, though. Cash, you're right, just because it's probably easier to transfer. And it is a little bit more private. Like if someone brings in $10 million of cash to a bank, that's going to be a news event, where crypto never has to go into a bank, it could just stay you know, now, now some of these decentralized exchanges are giving you credit cards, so it never has to go into the the mainstream system really.
Amy Zegart 58:04
Right. And you're not going to trip any wires by depositing a million dollars in cash in your bank account. Right. Right.
James Altucher 58:10
So So I wonder how to what extent like the the CIA, and these, you know, outward facing agencies, you know, are using Kryptos at this point?
Amy Zegart 58:19
It's a great question. I don't know the answer to that, that often. I'll have to research that for my next book.
James Altucher 58:23
Yeah, that would be a good book. Because, again, I've had some agency, former agency members allude to the fact that maybe crypto is being used quite a bit, you know, in order to make payments or transfer money or whatever. So, so look, Amy Zegart. Such an interesting book, spies, lies and algorithms, I would say the last book that gave me so much information about you know, American intelligence was the puzzle Palace, which was written in 1977. So I learned all about the NSA as like a 10 year old kid. But now I feel I have a much better understanding of what's actually going on in America in the intelligence industry. And thank you for answering all my kind of just dumb, naive questions.
Amy Zegart 59:11
Awesome questions, and it's such a delight to be on your podcast.
James Altucher 59:14
Well, well, Thanks, Amy. And and you're welcome back anytime, come back on for the next book on crypto and intelligence agencies, or are we didn't even talk quantum computing intelligence agencies. But the reason we didn't is because I don't believe that's in the near future. Do you get a sense that you get a sense the quantum computing is something that is going to be used in the near future?
Amy Zegart 59:34
Depends on how you define your future. Right. So I think it's certainly an over the horizon capability. I think not in the next couple of years. But if it does become reality, it means that our data and our encryption can be broken. So the consequences could be pretty serious.
James Altucher 59:50
Yeah. And well, I think about this a lot because on the one hand, you know, like, like with all technology, it doesn't happen and just one place in the world, it kind of happens by accident in many places in the world, like how calculus was discovered at the same time unknowingly by both Newton and Leibniz, and so on. But if somebody is even just a second ahead of somebody else in quantum computing, that's game over for the bagging system, for instance.
Amy Zegart 1:00:21
Right? That's true. This and I think you've hit on such a crucial difference today compared to the past, which is speed, that whoever gets these innovations faster, is going to gain the advantage and speed is not yours. Speed could be months speak could be milliseconds.
James Altucher 1:00:39
Yeah. Well, on that note of optimism, okay, well, we got it, we got it. You're an optimist, we have to end on a note of optimism. What's your optimistic conclusion from all of us?
Amy Zegart 1:00:48
My optimistic conclusion is that I think it's never been a more exciting time to be involved in national security. And I'm teaching this class based on the book at Stanford in the spring. And I can't tell you how exciting it is to see all of these bright students wanting to learn about intelligence, wanting to learn about national security and wanting some part of their life, whatever they do, whether it's in the private sector, in the public sector, to look at how to make the world more peaceful and better. So my students always give me optimism. And so I wrote this textbook as a textbook to teach at Stanford, and I'm really excited to get in the classroom with it in the spring.
James Altucher 1:01:24
What this didn't this did not read like a textbook. So I'm very impressed. But okay, here's the last dumb question and be the last question. If you were to work, clearly, you're interested in the intelligence agency industry. If you were to work for an intelligence agency, which one would you work for? And what would you do?
Amy Zegart 1:01:44
Wow, you're gonna make me a lot of enemies at 17 agencies in the US intelligence community, but
James Altucher 1:01:50
hands, because I'm trying to recruit you for North Korea intelligence.
Amy Zegart 1:01:53
Hands down, I'd say the Central Intelligence Agency. Why is that? Because the Central Intelligence Agency is an is the premier all source analysis agency, they bring it all together, they have the hardest challenge of preventing strategic surprise. So if you're going to be in the analysis business, and that's what I do for a living, I want to be on the toughest problems, and I think the agency has had a lot of a lot of difficult challenges. They've gotten a lot wrong, but I've been so impressed by the people I've met there and the dedication they have to what they do.
James Altucher 1:02:24
All right, well, Amy Zegart, hopefully your dreams come true. Maybe you already are working for the CIA, I don't know. So spies, lies and algorithms the history and future of American intelligence by Amy Zegart.