Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

cipherbrief

Welcome! Log in to stay connected and make the most of your experience.

Input clean

Intelligence

If You Can Run a Spy, You Can Run AI

Generative AI should be managed like a human source: useful, fast, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, and never a substitute for disciplined [...] More

The Latest

Cuba’s New Spy Array Raises Concerns for U.S. Security

BLUFF — On 18 June, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) researchers released a new study that says Cuba has completed construction [...] More

US-POLITICS-OBAMA-INTELLIGENCE

DNI Day One: Three Strategic Decisions for National Security Evolution

Authors’ Note:This paper is intended to frame a discussion, not settle one.Too often, debates about intelligence reform begin with organizational [...] More

The Warning Paradox: Why Correct Intelligence Often Fails

In the months before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Intelligence Community did something remarkable. It got the call right—and [...] More

Economic Security in an Age of Strategic Competition

There is a growing perception among long-standing US allies that they need to expand commercial relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). [...] More

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

Why the U.S. Cannot Afford to Lose Intelligence Partners

THE BLUF: Working with partners is a key intelligence tool. While the US has one of the best if not the best intelligence organizations in the world, [...] More

Radical Empathy: The Counterintuitive Skill That Made Me Better at Everything Else

There's a moment in every intelligence officer's career when they realize something uncomfortable: to be effective at their job, they must genuinely [...] More

The Limits of Human Oversight at Machine Speed

OPINION — Warfare has always operated at human speed, but we now have the capability to operate at machine speed. The risks are high, but so are 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

Sustaining Decision Advantage: The Case for Analytic Tradecraft Reform

OPINION -- In an era where warfighters and decision-makers have on-demand access to vast data holdings and AI-generated insights, the future of [...] More