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Intelligence Community

CIA

DNI Day Two: Building the Intelligence Community for 2045

Author's NoteIn our first paper, DNI Day One: Three Strategic Decisions for National Security Evolution, we identified three challenges confronting [...] More

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Alex Younger: An Unusually Likeable Human Being, And A Spy

Sir Alex Younger died earlier this week at the age of 62. He had been fighting cancer for some time. Alex was Chief of the Secret Intelligence [...] More

Remembering Alex Younger: The Intelligence Chief Who Shaped a Generation

I don't want to write about Sir Alex Younger, my predecessor as Chief of SIS.I want to write about my friend.I had known about Alex's cancer from the [...] More

Rethinking the Intelligence Cycle for the AI Era

There’s a profound assumption embedded in much of today’s conversation about AI and intelligence: better technology will solve our core problems. We [...] More

Inside the FBI’s New Push to Track Leaks and Monitor Employees

OPINION — “The FBI requests $7 million to procure and deploy a digital watermarking solution capable of embedding unique digital forensic watermarks [...] More

The Intelligence Community’s Acquisition Revolution: Can Washington Move Fast Enough?

OPINION -- On February 9, the CIA announced a major overhaul of its technology acquisition from the private sector. Director John Ratcliffe described [...] More

An FBI Perspective on FISA Section 702

I spent twenty years at the FBI supporting investigations into cybercrime, tracking ransomware gangs, and watching foreign adversaries tear through [...] More

Why Australia Needs a National Spy Museum

Australia is entering one of the most complex and psychologically destabilizing security periods in its modern history. The ASIO Director‑General’s [...] More

U.S. And Israel Wage War Against Iran

U.S. Intel’s Sobering Assessment of Iran’s War Resilience

Six weeks into Operation Epic Fury, with airstrikes having killed a sitting supreme leader, wiped out scores of top military and intelligence [...] More

A Wartime Budget Without an Innovation Strategy

“The use cases that help to drive the research agenda can come from a variety of different settings…We need to acknowledge that it's okay for those [...] More

New Presidential Executive Order Targets Transnational Cybercrime

The Cipher Brief broke new ground when it published my piece addressing scams as a national security issue in December 2023. Two years later, there [...] More

How GEOINT Can Sustain US Advantages in Africa

Africa presents a range of security, economic, and humanitarian challenges to US national security that the Intelligence Community must stay ahead of [...] More

The Downside to Mission Focus: Why the Intelligence Community Should Not Forget to Look Inward

Not long ago, I was talking to an old friend and China analyst about the need for Intelligence Community (IC) analysts to spend significantly more [...] More