Leveraging Tech in the Intelligence Community

By Chip Usher

William “Chip” Usher is the Senior Director for Intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project. Prior to SCSP, Chip served 32 years in the Central Intelligence Agency where he held a variety of executive positions. Chip is a former member of the Senior Intelligence Service and has expertise on East Asia, the Near East, and Eurasia.

EXPERT Q&A – Emerging technologies, from generative artificial intelligence to advanced computing, may pose signficant risks to the U.S. and its allies when used by adversaries for malicious activities such as spreading disinformation. But these technologies can also serve to bolster the intelligence community, and its mission to better understand and utilize the vast amounts of data at its disposal, especially in the open-source space.

Cipher Brief CEO and Publisher Suzanne Kelly spoke with Chip Usher, who spent 32 years at the Central Intelligence Agency and is now Senior Director for Intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), to discus how technology can help drive the competitiveness and effectiveness of the intelligence community.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Listen to the whole discussion by subscribing to the State Secrets Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The Cipher Brief: How would you best describe your work at the Special Competitive Studies Project?

Usher: Technology is scary. It’s happening at a really rapid pace. But here at SCSP, on the intelligence program, what we are trying to do is illuminate the opportunities and the benefits that some of these advanced technologies can afford our intelligence community in addition to the new headaches, new burdens, new vulnerabilities and threats that these technologies also can pose.

We focus on a wide array of advanced technologies. We’ve got our breakdown of the key tech that we think will shape the fate of nations over the next two decades. We tend to bucket those into six categories, which I can get into. But AI is one of them, and advanced computing, and that sort of thing.

And in each of these areas, in the intelligence panel, which I lead, we try to focus on how this is going to impact the business of intelligence. And some of these technologies will have a scant or oblique impact – thinking of new sources of energy like fusion. It will be important to everybody. It will be a general technology one day, and we’ll be consumers of that form of energy. But then there are other technologies like generative AI which we think will have a profound impact, a direct impact on what the intelligence community can and will be doing in the future.

So it’s thinking about the business of intelligence and how it’s positioned, how it should be positioned to take advantage of these new technologies, and also to protect itself because the new emerging technologies will bring new and emerging vulnerabilities.


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The Cipher Brief: Whether it’s understanding the use of the technologies, how they can benefit the intelligence community, or how to go through the mountains and mountains of data that we’re now flooded by, how are you thinking about that in your role at SCSP?

Usher: We just released our big report, which is called “The Vision for Competitiveness.” I encourage everybody to come to our website and read it. The main message is that we are at a pivotal point as a nation. Just as the country had to kind of rethink its national security and its national security policymaking approach at the advent of the Cold War, we’re now at an inflection point, driven by two things.

One is the important advent of these new technologies – things like generative AI or advanced semiconductors and advanced compute, advanced manufacturing. These technologies are gaining a lot of headlines today, but they really will decide which countries are going to have the most successful economies, the most successful innovation systems, and which forms of government are going to prevail in the years ahead. So technology is a pivotal factor.

And then as we’ve seen in the last, two years, the axis of disruptors — the Chinas, the Russians, Irans, North Koreas — they’re really challenging the global world order as established by the United States and our allies. It’s becoming quite acute. Ukraine is probably the most prominent example, but it is not alone. China’s pressure on Taiwan, Iran’s meddling across the Near East, North Korea’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and pressure across Northeast Asia. They are representing an alternative way to order the world, and the United States and friendly Democratic governments need to come up with an answer to that in a way that our country did back in the 1950s and 1960s.

And so we drew as our inspiration a memo that was written by Paul Nitze back in that early period of the Cold War, the NSC-68 memorandum, which some of us studied in school. But when you take a look at it, it really does offer a very deep and penetrating analysis of the global situation at that time.

It also provides a whole-of-government strategic approach to prevailing in the Cold War. And there were a lot of twists and turns along the way, but ultimately we did win that war of ideas and of technology against the Soviet Union. And we see ourselves at a moment now where we need to rethink again how we approach this.

And the key element in my mind is that we should be coming from a stance or position of strategic confidence. The United States is still the greatest country on Earth. We have tremendous resources, tremendous know-how. Our military is second to none. We have every reason to be confident. And, you know, I realize that there’s a lot of hand-wringing and second-guessing and a lot of internal political bickering that occurs in our country and in other Western democracies. But at our core, we’re still the strongest nation, and with our allies, the strongest force across the globe. So we should be approaching this from a position of confidence.

And we should be focusing on developing the ecosystems that our technologists will need to help us succeed in the years ahead. And as part of that, the intelligence community needs to do its part to support this drive for strategic victory over the coming decade.

The Cipher Brief: What were some of your recommendations from the report? What can we be doing better when it comes to understanding the intersection of intelligence and technology?

Usher: Our report really focuses on four areas for the intelligence community to focus on.

One is to move out smartly to gain advantage in generative artificial intelligence and the affiliated technologies that go with that. Our intelligence community is no stranger to AI. We were early experimenters and early adopters of the technology, going back several decades. But as we’ve all witnessed, the advent of Chat GPT and now other similarly capable large-language models have made generative AI more accessible and its potential more apparent to all of us around the world. And the intelligence community should be embracing this new technology and trying to take advantage of it, even as it shields itself, protects itself, and takes steps to understand how our adversaries are using it, because they certainly are and they will be. We’ve already seen examples coming out of China, for example, where some cyber groups have been promulgating deep fake videos promoting politicians and political messages that are very good and they’re hard for your average person to detect. And this sort of thing is going to happen more and more and more.

So the intelligence community needs to learn about these models, bring them in, experiment with them, and start using them in their intelligence processes. And I think the impacts will be felt up and down the intelligence community enterprise, all the way from collection and analysis to ordinary backroom processes like travel and finance and whatnot.

Just to give one example, I’m sure you’re familiar with Analyst Notebook and some of the tools that targeters in the intelligence community use to understand, say, terrorist networks.

The Cipher Brief: It’s a software program that’s used within the IC that really helps you map and sort of plot pieces of information, right?

Usher: That’s a great description of it. And what you see on the screen is fascinating where you see a kind of a spiderweb diagram with circles and lines connecting them. And when you sit down with an expert, you say, this is great and what can you do with it? And they’ll tell you, well, if you give me a name, I can tell you who they’re connected to, or I can click on somebody and tell you who they’re connected to.

But it’s not the same thing as saying, OK, but what do I do? What’s my strategy for attacking this network? Or how do I dismantle this group of terrorists? What’s the most effective way of doing so? And here’s where generative AI can come in. It takes that data and doesn’t just present it graphically, but it can help you understand and come up with recommended courses of action to take to pursue the goals that you’ve identified. So it kind of takes that big data piece and takes it one step further. And that’s just one area where AI probably will have some impact.


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The Cipher Brief: How are you thinking about getting over sort of the fundamental question, “How can I trust that the computer is giving me information that I can put into my recommendations?’

Usher: This is absolutely a concern right now and something that the intelligence community needs to think about very, very carefully because as we’ve tried some of these chatbots, they don’t always give you the most accurate information or even the best information. So the IC has to maintain its very high standards for accuracy and veracity. To put forth half-baked analysis from AI is not anything that we would advocate for.

But there are some areas where AI can help improve efficiencies and make a critical difference. Maybe not immediately in the delivery of what we would call finished product to a senior policymaker. In other words, you can’t just give it a policymaker’s question and it will spit out a completely formed answer that we would trust and use at the moment.

But as an analyst, they could use AI at times in their process to weigh through all that data to help them surface what are the most important reports, perhaps summarize those for them, or make those connections via Analyst Notebook or some other tool, or help them think creatively about how to structure their argument, or help them think creatively about how to engage policy customers.

So there are ways that AI could be operating in the background in tandem with humans to make that process even better, that are maybe a step short of just having them write the analysis. Maybe one day the tools will be so good that we would trust them to do it. But at this stage, right, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.

The Cipher Brief: What were some of the other areas where you felt like there were recommendations that you’re making that would get us closer to more efficiently using that sort of human-technology integration?

Usher: I’ll focus on two of them. The first is to better leverage open-source intelligence. Your website and your podcast have written and talked eloquently about the need for better use of OSINT. The intelligence community has long recognized this as a necessary goal.

But the urgency with which we need to move out and do this is becoming more acute. And that’s because the amount of data that is now available digitally is just exploding. And much of that is commercially available data, data that is either being made for sale or is just being crafted and developed by private-sector entities all over the world. And pretty soon it’s going to just swamp and overwhelm the volume of data that is being produced by the intelligence community or done through classified means.

A company now is using digital platforms to understand its customers, to run its finances, what we do when we transact funds digitally, all that’s in the realm of commercially available data. Some companies try to make active use of it and sell it. Some just use it for internal purposes. But it’s data that the private sector is generating for its own purposes.

So a lot of that is consumer focused, but not all of it. But this data sphere is really quite potent and quite valuable. Big companies use it to promote their brands, defend their brands, defend their people, plan their marketing strategies, et cetera. But governments have yet to develop a really smooth and adept way of interacting with these organizations to make use of this data when appropriate for national security purposes.

And we’re at a point now where the intelligence community agencies devoted to open source really aren’t fully resourced or equipped to handle it. And so one of our key recommendations is that rather than trying to fight the trend or ignore it or try to buy all the data one possibly can, that the intelligence community create another In-Q-Tel-like organization, a public foundation that’s funded by government and sits adjacent to the IC. And it’s their sole purpose to understand this marketplace of commercially available data and bring that into the IC for its use.

The Cipher Brief: In-Q-Tel was launched really as an answer to trying to find ways to invest in companies that would have technologies that they could use in the IC. And this is something similar, but more focused on open source. Is that right?

Usher: That’s right. And we would argue its first focus should be on the data, but a lot of companies are also developing analytic tools. We’ve seen a proliferation of companies that are offering web -based tools for understanding business to business relationships, financial flows. There are companies out there that specialize in delivering products and services for the owners of high-end yachts – those billionaire boats that travel the Mediterranean, they all require services and personnel. Well, there are analytic tools that tell you where all those boats are located. You know, those sorts of things are very useful. And the consortium would be able to bring forward not just the data sets, but also the tools that are being developed on the outside to make use of them.


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The Cipher Brief: Could talk a little bit about the urgency of this? China in particular, Russia, Iran, and now North Korea. It feels like we’re in a foot race. Are we in a foot race?

Usher: We are definitely in a foot race with this axis of disruptors who are aligning with each other more and more and cooperating in more and more fields. And this puts pressure on the United States as a nation and our allies.

It also puts pressure on the U.S. intelligence community because these technological developments are not hidden, they’re not secret from our adversaries and they’re already investing billions of dollars to gain advantage for themselves.

China has already identified artificial intelligence as a battleground that it needs to win on in the years ahead. They are investing a lot of money, government funds through private labs or through private companies, but very much at the behest of or under the direction of Beijing to develop algorithms, their own large-language models, and are developing ways to use them.

One ironic advantage of an authoritarian system is they can be much more top down. So it means the integration of technologies in their ecosystem can happen a bit faster than it does here in a Westernstyle democracy. So we see this playing out in how they are able to deploy AI as they support some of their technology companies in the gaming sphere or in online retail or in some of their social media platforms.

This plays into their strength, their ability to better integrate and more quickly integrate technologies, because Beijing will pick winners within particular industries and tell those companies what they need to do in support of the state.

That’s China, and Russia and Iran are also very active. But one thing that we shouldn’t lose sight of is that the democratization of these technologies means that non-state actors, including terror groups like Hezbollah or Hamas, can also gain access to some of these technologies and use them for their own purposes.

The Cipher Brief: It’s a daunting picture. How critical is it that the public and private sectors in the West form a much stronger alliance based on sort of trust and information sharing?

Usher: It’s absolutely critical and the fundamental reason why is because unlike in the 1940s or the 50s, when federally-funded research and development programs were behind many of the advanced technologies of the day – think of the early days of the NASA space program – today, the source of innovation really comes almost exclusively from the private sector.

So the intelligence community needs to modernize its relationship with the private sector for two reasons.

One is it needs to have a tight partnership with the developers of new technologies in order to bring them into the IC for intelligence purposes where appropriate, and to do that quickly, at the pace of innovation, which as we’ve seen with ChatGPT, it’s already on model 4.0 after a little over 18 months.

But the second reason is to understand the global technology landscape and how foreign countries or foreign adversaries are understanding and using these technologies. There needs to be importation of technology into the IC, and there needs to be information flow or analytic exchange with technology companies to understand what’s happening out there in the world.

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