BOOK REVIEW: THE FOURTH INTELLIGENCE REVOLUTION: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America
By: Anthony Vinci/ Henry Holt and Company
Reviewed by: Glenn S. Gerstell
The Reviewer : Cipher Brief Expert Glenn S. Gerstell is a Principal with the Cyber Initiatives Group and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and writes and speaks about the intersection of technology, national security and privacy.
REVIEW — For at least the past several years, national security experts have been discussing how threats have dramatically changed and intensified, principally due to the confluence of increasingly complex geopolitical challenges and of global technological advances. Anthony Vinci’s The Fourth Intelligence Revolution is an excellent and well-written addition to those discussions, which inevitably conclude that America’s spy agencies must not merely adapt to but also dominate this dynamic if we are to blunt (if not defeat) our adversaries. What sets his book apart from other commentaries is its greater depth, its broad, historical and up-to-date recounting of the history of our spy agencies, its clear explanation of the technology confronting us today, and – perhaps more questionably – its call to action for individual citizens to play a role in the intelligence mission.
Vinci formed his views principally while serving as the first chief technology officer (2017-2019) for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), having previously worked as an intelligence officer in Iraq and elsewhere. In his view – shared generally by historians – there have been three prior eras in modern intelligence: during World War II and the formation of the Office of Strategic Services, a time of solid alliances and global war; the ensuing “golden age” of intelligence during the Cold War in a clearly delineated bipolar world with intelligence focused on military information; and the far more chaotic period focusing on counterterrorism after the 9/11 attacks.
Today, newer, interrelated phenomena of almost unimaginable technologic development, globalization pushed by irresistible economic forces, the rise of China as a world power and the concomitant fraying of the international order have yielded the Fourth Intelligence Revolution. In Vinci’s view:
This revolution will be marked by several facets. Intelligence will expand even further, into wider and wider parts of society. Technology will play an even bigger role, especially AI, which will automate more and more of intelligence until we reach a point where machines spy on machines. Networking and sensor technologies will proliferate to a point where the whole world may be monitored and we will all become targets of intelligence but also be able to use that same technology to execute intelligence ourselves. This revolution will expand so far that it will be marked by the democratization of intelligence and its incorporation into our personal lives to a point where we will all effectively become citizen spies.
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The author makes his argument in a series of well-organized chapters, each covering a particular type of geopolitical or technological threat. He starts with a short and lively history of U.S. spy agencies and how they adapted from fighting Hitler to confronting the Soviet Union in the midst of an arms race, and then shifted from nation-state adversaries to amorphous terrorists scattered around the globe. Several chapters are devoted to the varied threats posed by China, including one covering the disinformation and surveillance risks of TikTok, the Chinese-controlled wildly popular video sharing app. Vinci’s view of China is not a nuanced one; China is an “existential threat.” It would have been good if the book explored the complications arising from the fact that (like it or not) China is an indispensable trading partner and a global power with which we must cooperate. That presents opportunities for intelligence collection (American businesses do operate extensively in the PRC) but it also means that our intelligence operations aimed at the PRC are more complex and fraught. We don’t have such complexities with, say, North Korea, which is in all respects an adversary and of no real economic significance to, well, anyone.
Another chapter explores how businesses now replicate – and in many ways surpass – government’s collection of information, especially in the economic sphere. Vinci was at the center of the NGA’s successful efforts to take advantage of private sector satellite imagery to supplement the ‘exquisite” information collected by spy satellites. As the definition of national security broadens to encompass commercial and economic information and scientific achievements in a variety of fields, the private sector is in the best position to collect and assess that data. Yet effectively collaborating with the government is a challenge. Vinci correctly notes that the spy agencies might not have the expertise to understand the implications of highly technical scientific and technical information outside the weapons sphere. As others have done, he calls for better solutions to the public and private engagement that will be needed, with one such possibility being a new “National Economic Defense Center…that would coordinate all governmental economic intelligence.”
Other chapters tackle the risks of biogenetic engineering and the ramifications of ubiquitous and powerful AI, including the threats posed by autonomous warfare as is increasingly evidenced in Ukraine. But there is relatively little on the potential benefits of quantum computing, and most of the book’s examples are, as might be expected given the author’s background, drawn from the world of space imagery – with the effects of technology on signals intelligence and human intelligence for the NSA and CIA somewhat less analyzed.
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His conclusion is that government alone will not be able to safeguard our future from these ever-expanding threats. “Whole of nation” private sector involvement is critical but even that is insufficient – in his view, individual citizens must play a crucial role in the intelligence function. He points out that authoritarian governments target individuals – whether simply to build dossiers on everyone, as China is suspected of doing or for more nefarious purposes such as pushing individually tailored disinformation. Consequently, he asserts that “to counter it, we must all become spies.” To the extent that he means that individuals must be ever more vigilant about surveillance, data privacy and cyber risks generally, no one could argue with such a goal. But it’s less clear that putting more of the national security burden on individual citizens is desirable, realistic, or likely to be effective.
Readers of the Cipher Brief will find his fundamental thesis familiar – for example, Amy Zegart’s 2022 volume Spies, Lies and Algorithms covered many of the same topics, and this reviewer’s 2019 New York Times article outlined how the digital revolution would require the IC to adapt. (For another thoughtful discussion of the effect of AI on future espionage, see the just-released The Digital Case Officer from the Special Competitive Studies Project.) Moreover, the timing of the book’s publication did not allow any discussion of how President Trump’s extensive programmatic and personnel changes to the national security mission and the IC might affect the nation’s ability to address the threats that are Vinci’s focus.
But none of that dilutes the recommendation for the book – it’s highly readable and up-to-date on current threats and capabilities (with a helpful index and source notes) – and would be especially appreciated by students in any national security course, lay readers interested in the topic and Congressional staffers and other policy makers who want to learn more about how to keep our nation safe.
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The Fourth Intelligence Revolution earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
