What’s Next in Nat-Sec Tech

For nearly a decade, AFCEA and INSA have jointly hosted a large conference in the nation’s capitaI, and the 2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit takes place on September 15/16 at DC’s Gaylord National Conference Center. I’m involved in both of these fine organizations and we’re very pleased with the line-up of speakers and participants, and with the post-pandemic full return to in-person activity for the Summit. With a little over two weeks to go before the event, we have over 1,100 attendees registered and 70+ exhibitors. Full agenda is here.

From the main keynote by Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks, through thoughtfully composed panels on a wide variety of topics, there are great opportunities to learn from experts and discuss with peers and colleagues across the spectrum of defense, homeland security, intelligence, and technology disciplines. I’m delighted to be moderating the panel on “Technology Futures for National Security,” with a dream-team of top leaders from DoD, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector.

It’s rare to have the Directors of both DARPA and IARPA on the same stage, the esteemed Stefanie Tompkins and Catherine Marsh, but we have them. Rounding out the panel is a private-sector leader who has earlier held one of those jobs and overseen the other; today Lisa Porter is co-founder of leading management, scientific, and technical consulting firm LogiQ Inc., and former president of Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, but she was earlier the founding director of IARPA, and more recently was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering overseeing DARPA and the rest of DoD’s $70+billion R&D efforts.

Should be an outstanding discussion. Feel free to suggest questions to me beforehand whether you’re attending or not; if you’re attending I might even ask them 😉 We have a lot to talk about; here’s the summary blurb:

Technology Futures: Who’s investing how much in what, and when might it pay off? These panelists define the answers to those questions. It has now become a truism that the IC and DoD confront a world where the U.S. no longer monopolizes science and technology advances – yet the government still has the obligation to fund and create breakthrough technologies for advantage in national security. Commercial R&D drives tech advance broadly, but new mission-advantageous breakthroughs will come largely from the nation’s two leading national-security innovation lighthouses, DARPA and IARPA. This session will hear from those who have been charged with leading the government’s efforts to provide innovative future technologies necessary for our security – and with incisive observations from the private-sector. We’ll look at current work on revolutionary opportunities for advantage, but beyond just a buzzword glance across the litany of investment areas (“AI,” “quantum,” “cybersecurity,” “metaverse”) there’ll be a focus on the system-of-systems challenges in bringing radical new capabilities to real operational life across the siloed halls of DoD and the IC.

Our morning-of-Day-Two panel is just one of the many great sessions, which include:

• Chinese Threats to U.S. Supply Chains
• Leading Change: A Look at the CIO, CDO, CTO, and CDAO Roles
• Public Data and IC Analysis: Improving Integration of Public-Private Capabilities
• Commercial Space-Based Intelligence for National Security
• Intelligence Priorities of the U.S. Military Services
• Russia/Ukraine Conflict: Implications for U.S. National Security
• Midterms 2022: Election Security
• Strategic Intelligence Challenges / IC Leaders Panel

We’ve lined up many leading government, industry, academic and media figures for the 2022 Summit, and I hope you are able to participate as well! More information at intelsummit.org.

New Faces at the Intelligence Committee

It turns out that this blog can be an effective recruitment device. At least two newly-elected members of the prestigious AFCEA Intelligence Committee tell me that they applied for the biannual selection process after first reading about it here earlier. This week LTG Bob Noonan (retired head of U.S. Army Intelligence and the committee’s chair) announced the new members, and the list is indeed impressive. As the vice chair, I am surrounded by members with stellar careers and I always quietly keep in mind the great line from Groucho Marx, “I refuse to belong to any organization that would have me for a member.”

Congratulations to our new superstar members, listed here in either alphabetical order or by height, I can’t remember which:

• Robert Ames, Sr. Director, Emerging Technologies, VMware and former SVP, In-Q-Tel
• Jason Bacheler, Principal, Corporate Information Security, Lockheed Martin
• Melissa Cutter, Director, AT&T
• David Lee, President, ASRC Federal – Exatech
• Katharina McFarland, President, Blue Oryx, Inc. and former Asst. Secretary of Defense
• Dr. Lisa Porter, Co-President, LogiQ, Inc., former Director of IARPA and former Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering
• Teresa Smetzer, VP, National Security Programs, Salesforce and former Director, Digital Futures, CIA
• LtGen Vincent Stewart, USMC (Ret), CEO, Stewart Global Solutions and former Deputy Commander, US Cyber Command and former Director, DIA

Congratulations to them all. We’re going to put them all to work now, starting with the upcoming annual AFCEA/INSA Intelligence & National Security Summit – which is virtual this year, meaning that naturally there are still tickets available 🙂 and you can register here.

How to Apply for the AFCEA Intelligence Committee

If you’re engaged in the business of intelligence, you’re likely aware of (and already registered for) an annual highlight in that world, the AFCEA/INSA Intelligence and National Security Summit, this year a virtual event on September 16/17. Stellar lineup as always, but typically invisible is the behind-the-scenes work in preparation, done by staff and volunteer members of INSA and the AFCEA Intelligence Committee. Monday August 10, 2020 (update – extended from Friday August 7) is the deadline for annual new applications to join that prestigious AFCEA International Intelligence Committee, a premier outside body of experts and insiders, government officials and business/academic leaders, who oversee the intelligence-related activities of the 32,000+ member Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association.

Private-sector applicants for four-year terms can apply at this link. (Hurry! You have only till midnight August 10.)  You can easily fill out the simple online application in less than an hour, not burdensome – no college transcripts required 🙂

Where else in DC can you engage with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and hackathons on national security? My own tenure on the Committee has been fantastically fun and enlightening – and I hope helpful to AFCEA and the government agencies we advise and support. When I joined, our Committee’s Chair was the IC legend Maureen “Mo” Baginski, career NSA and FBI senior leader; and I’ve been honored to serve as vice-chair to her two successors in that seat, former DIA Director VADM Jake Jacoby, and current chair former head of Army Intelligence LTG Bob Noonan. Leaders from the world’s biggest defense/intelligence contractors are members, as well as successful startup leaders in the nat-sec space. We benefit from active emeritus members who continue to participate like CIA’s legendary Charlie Allen and the world’s preeminent scholar of intelligence Mark “Jeopardy Champion” Lowenthal.

You must have an active TS/SCI clearance, as many of our activities and conferences are classified – we’re even planning fully virtual classified events this winter. And the application weighs heavily on your career track record, so we encourage recently retired senior civilian leaders and military members as well to apply.. We especially encourage applicants diverse in origin, gender, race, background, skills, and outlook —to reflect the nation as a whole and the diversity of the intelligence mission itself, and to break chains of old thinking and get crackling new ideas on tomorrow’s most significant topics.  

In considering applicants during the selection process, these are the primary precepts we keep in mind when we consider applicants:
(1) Would the candidate further Committee efforts to build bridges between industry and the government/military? And have the contacts to do so?
(2) Would the candidate enhance AFCEA’s reputation with the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense?
(3) Would the candidate likely be someone willing to actively engage with the Committee and help advance its goals?
(4) Would the candidate further thought leadership and innovation within AFCEA, to include involvement with other AFCEA Committee efforts?

When I was elected not long after leaving government service and going back to the tech industry, I wrote here about the Committee’s history and prominence, and that I was “honored to be elected” to this “prestigious collection of some of the smartest minds in that field.” I was tempted to respond then with William F. Buckley’s great line from his quixotic and unsuccessful Mayoral campaign in New York City in 1965, when he was asked what his first act would be if elected: “Demand a recount!”

Once again, here’s that link to the application site. Good luck!

How I Use Tech and Media during the Pandemic

My friend and longtime colleague (back to ancient days in a leading intelligence agency) Bob Gourley now leads CTOvision and a consulting firm OODA LLC, and is widely known as a leading global voice on tech trends. He recently launched a video/podcast series “OODAcast” to fill our days and nights with commentary on “Hot Topics in Enterprise IT and Business Risk,” and I was flattered to be asked to participate.

Here’s the video of Part I of our conversation (there’s a second half forthcoming). But if you don’t want to suffer through a half-hour of me bloviating, below I have provided a few excerpts and annotations on topics I mention, so you can skim below instead 🙂

 

4:20 – We begin with the role of technology in government and public policy, including today’s COVID-19 crisis and back in the early atomic era (referencing Einstein and Oppenheimer)

From 6:20 – Discussion of how to deal with information overload amid the COVID-19. I discuss maximizing “the positive side” of easy access to enormous data via the Internet: “there continue to be what fully existed before the Internet era, and that is a wealth of trusted, branded, curated sources of edited news. I have a lot of respect for the role of editor… the smartest person on campus was the editor of that paper, and he corrected a lot of mistakes that I made.” That editor of The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia whom I refer to was Woody Holton, who predictably went on to become a highly regarded historian and writer.

At 9:00 – I mention being the sole home-delivery subscriber to the print-edition New York Times in my rural Essex County, Virginia, along with contrasts of online news sources and social media sources. (I should mention here that working from home for me has always been easy, in part because my company VMware has been enabling virtual remote-work long before the pandemic.)

10:45 – I discuss the comparison of two versions, online and print, of a NY Times information visualization of the origins and spread of the novel coronavirus in 2019-2020. The online version is here, while below are some clips of the print version, on the front page and across two interior double-page-spreads:

13:40 – I refer to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and its “COVID-19 and AI, A Virtual Conference,” which is described and video-archived here.  I’ll also recommend from ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, its new comprehensive guide “to conference organizers suddenly facing the need to move their conference online in light of the social distancing recommendations and global restrictions on travel.”

15:40 – I describe my use of curated Twitter Lists. At Bob’s urging, I have opened up several of my curated “private” lists (see below for links to follow them, but I’ve kept my best and most exotic Lists locked for now):

• AI People (142 accounts)
• US Politics/Government (245 accounts)
• UK Politics/Government (75 accounts)
• Top R&D Orgs (23 accounts)
• SCOTUS, US Supreme Court news (41 accounts)
• China Topics (87 accounts)
• Russia Topics (52 accounts)

18:35 – Discussion of using LinkedIn for “authentication and validation of who’s posting what you’re looking at… you wind up becoming as nimble as an HR professional at assessing the credibility of people based on their track record, background and online resume… Especially in this period where everybody’s working remotely I notice that the volume of posting on LinkedIn has really grown.”

Your comments on the discussion are welcome below, and stay tuned for Part II….

 

 

 

My Telework Tool Tally

Today’s Tuesday, April 7, and I’ve been working from home almost entirely for some three-plus weeks now. (VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger began our company-wide work-from-home on March 14; and my advisory office inside a DoD agency went “strongly-encouraged remote work” not long after.) So far this week alone, on just Monday and Tuesday, I’ve had the following virtual meetings:

5 Zoom (Enterprise)
1 Zoom Government (CAC-enabled, FEDRAMP-cloud hosted)
1 Google Hangout
1 MS Teams
2 VMware Horizon virtualizing Skype for Business
1 Ubiety
1 GoToWebinar
1 WebEx
2 Phone conference calls (one coordinated/scheduled via Calendly)

I can live with any of them, though of course quality varies, including within the meeting. Users hunt for mute/unmute buttons and other controls, with no consistency across the platforms – it reminds me of the ancient days learning different bold and underline commands in WordStar and WordPerfect 🙂

Admittedly like most people my favorite feature is the Zoom virtual background; and while I haven’t gone to as much trouble as some of my friends in Palo Alto and elsewhere who have deployed home-office green-screens and photoshopped fancy memes, I’ve been having bipartisan fun switching between these two this week:

 

 

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that while several of my Zoom “enterprise” meetings and both of the conference calls were internal corporate ones, all the rest included government colleagues, i.e. officials at one or another U.S. government agency – typically with the Defense Department or Intelligence Community. In a few cases they were participating from inside their regular offices, but the majority of them were working from home.

And we got a lot done! But there will be social reverberations. To quote Shakespeare via Aldous Huxley, “O brave new world…”

 

About the Other Intelligence Leadership Opening

Yes, the news is abuzz with leadership turnover in the Intelligence Community. Wait – not that news about outgoing DNI Dan Coats, the important news: it’s time for applications to the prestigious AFCEA International Intelligence Committee, the premier outside body of experts and insiders, government officials and business/academic leaders, who oversee the intelligence-related activities of the 32,000+ member organization.

Private-sector applicants for four-year terms can apply at this link. (Hurry! You have only a week till the deadline, midnight August 5, 2019.)  You can do the application in under an hour, not burdensome – no college transcripts 🙂

Where else in DC can you engage with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, hackathons on national security, and the leaders of the national-security community? My own tenure on the Committee has been fantastically fun and enlightening – and I hope helpful to AFCEA and the government agencies we advise and support. When I joined, our Committee’s Chair was the IC legend Maureen “Mo” Baginski, career NSA and FBI senior leader; and I’ve been honored to serve as vice-chair to her two successors in that seat, former DIA Director VADM Jake Jacoby, and current chair former head of Army Intelligence LTG Bob Noonan. Leaders from the world’s biggest defense/intelligence contractors are members, as well as successful startup leaders in the nat-sec space. We benefit from active emeritus members who continue to participate like CIA’s legendary Charlie Allen and the world’s preeminent scholar of intelligence Mark “Jeopardy Champion” Lowenthal.

You must have an active TS/SCI clearance, as many of our activities and conferences are classified. And the application weighs heavily on your career track record. We especially encourage applicants diverse in origin, gender, race, background, skills, and outlook —to reflect the nation as a whole and the diversity of the intelligence mission itself, and to break chains of old thinking and get crackling new ideas on tomorrow’s most significant topics.  

In considering applicants during the selection process, these are the primary precepts we keep in mind when we consider applicants:
(1) Would the candidate further Committee efforts to build bridges between industry and the government/military? And have the contacts to do so?
(2) Would the candidate enhance AFCEA’s reputation with the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense?
(3) Would the candidate likely be someone willing to actively engage with the Committee and help advance its goals?
(4) Would the candidate further thought leadership and innovation within AFCEA, to include involvement with other AFCEA Committee efforts?

A key element in the Committee’s success is close ties with the Intelligence Community’s and the military services’ intelligence and cybersecurity organizations, the ability to reach into those organizations with current contacts and the relationships permitting direct interface with leadership.  These are key to high-content industry days, quiet advisory engagement at the government’s request, speakers for meetings and the regular engagements that keep AFCEA Intelligence in the fore in their planning.  We have Committee members who have been in the forefront of these efforts who are rotating off the Committee or have rotated off in recent years, and we encourage recently retired senior civilian leaders and military members as well to apply.

When I was elected not long after leaving government service and going back to the tech industry, I wrote here about the Committee’s history and prominence, and that I was “honored to be elected” to this “prestigious collection of some of the smartest minds in that field.” I was tempted to respond then with William F. Buckley’s great line from his quixotic and unsuccessful Mayoral campaign in New York City in 1965, when he was asked what his first act would be if elected: “Demand a recount!”

Once again, here’s that link to the application site. Good luck!

 

 

 

 

Deep Dive on AI and National Security

Although the day is very nearly sold-out, I’m told there’s a ticket or two still available for tomorrow’s Intelligence & National Security Summit “Classified Day,” the follow-on to last week’s multi-day unclassified sessions in DC. (For a good summary of last week see “Four Key Takeaways from the 2018 Intelligence and National Security Summit.”)

If you are able to make Wednesday’s session, at NGA Headquarters, you’ll see me interview Sue Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, one-on-one to kick off the TS/SCI day, followed by several in-depth threat briefs from the leadership of the National Intelligence Council.

But – my favorite – you’ll get to hear a high-intelligence-wattage panel I’m moderating on “Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Machine Augmentation.” When we began planning that panel, I hoped to achieve representation from Academia’s research world, the Intelligence Community, DoD’s increasingly energetic AI sector, and from leading Industry – not a simple task given the classification level. Shockingly, we scored on all four corners of the national security landscape. Here’s that panel:

• Matthew Gaston, Director, Emerging Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
• Dean Souleles, Chief Technology Advisor, ODNI
• Richard Linderman, Deputy Director of Research and Engineering for Information & Cyber Systems, DoD
• Thomas Reed, Senior Director, Solution Architect, NVIDIA

Full agenda is here, and you can read here more about the Classified Day overall, including last-minute directions if you can make it and we still let you in!

Building the Next Great Virtual Machine

I have a great new job, allowing me to spend several weeks recently in the center of the universe, and I’m loving it. I’m going to spend even more time there from now on.

By that I mean Palo Alto, Silicon Valley’s capital and VMware HQ, where I am now Senior Director, National Technology Strategy, working primarily with the R&D team. But I can’t help putting that “Valley capital” term in a bit of historical context. Back in ancient times (late ’80s-early ’90s) when I worked for the Mayor of San Jose, S. J. City Hall was dealing with a bit of civic insecurity. Although San Jose’s population was already larger than San Francisco and now the tenth largest city in the country, our mayor (my boss Tom McEnery, the first government leader ever elected to the Silicon Valley Business Hall of Fame) believed that we needed to brand the city explicitly as “The Capital of Silicon Valley.” So that became a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, and we punched the message home every chance we got.

Yet as the mayor’s policy adviser and speechwriter, I laughed each time I used the phrase. I had just moved to San Jose from Palo Alto, where I got a graduate degree at Stanford. Just twenty miles up Highway 101, Palo Alto had much better claim to being the center of the geographically hazy electronics domain. I knew the arguments we used in San Jose (see here for example). But I also had already met Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in person in Palo Alto, and had walked many times on the sidewalk by the legendary garage at 367 Addison where HP was born in the late 1930s; and I had also seen a different historic marker four blocks from the garage, at the corner of Channing and Emerson, commemorating Palo Alto’s very first electronics startup – Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909.

Palo Alto itself has spawned thousands of startups for many many decades, and it never stopped. Fast forward to the turn of the millenium just 20 years ago, when Microsoft and Amazon were trying to shift attention to Seattle/Redmond, Palo Alto struck back and fostered yet another legendary Valley startup: VMware – now my new home. Here’s the origin context for VMware, from an official history of Stanford Research Park:

It can be said that one of the cornerstones of Silicon Valley was laid when Varian Associates broke ground as Stanford Research Park’s first company in 1951. The Stanford Industrial Park, as it was first called, was the brainchild of Stanford University’s Provost and Dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman, who saw the potential of a University-affiliated business park that focused on research and development and generated income for the University and community.

Dean Terman envisioned a new kind of collaboration, where Stanford University could join forces with industry and the City of Palo Alto to advance shared interests. He saw the Park’s potential to serve as a beacon for new, high-quality scientists and faculty, provide jobs for University graduates, and stimulate regional economic development.

In the 1950s, leaders within the City of Palo Alto and Stanford University forged a seminal partnership by creating Stanford Research Park, agreeing to annex SRP lands into the City of Palo Alto to generate significant tax revenues for the County, City, and Palo Alto Unified School District.

Throughout our history, an incredible number of breakthroughs have occurred in Stanford Research Park. Here, Varian developed the microwave tube, forming the basis for satellite technology and particle accelerators. Its spin-off, Varian Medical, developed radiation oncology treatments, medical devices and software for medical diagnostics. Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer, breaking ground for the next generation of graphics and audio capabilities in personal computing. Hewlett-Packard developed electronic measuring instruments, leading to medical electronic equipment, instrumentation for chemical analysis, the mainframe computer, laser printers and hand-held calculators. At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), innovations such as personal work stations, Ethernet cabling and the personal computer mouse were invented. Lockheed’s space and missile division developed critical components for the International Space Station. Mark Zuckerberg grew Facebook’s social networking platform from 20 million to 750 million people worldwide while its headquarters were in the Park.

Today, Tesla’s electric vehicle and battery prototypes are developed and assembled here in its headquarters. Our largest tenant, VMware, continues to create the virtualization hardware and software solutions they pioneered, leading the world in cloud computing. With over 150 companies in 10 million square feet and 140 buildings, Stanford Research Park maintains a world-class reputation.

source: Stanford Research Park, “About Us”

In the summer of 2017, I got an email from a former Microsoft research colleague and one of the most eminent leaders in American technology R&D, David Tennenhouse. David has held key leadership roles in dream positions over the past quarter-century – everyone has wanted him on their team. He was Chief Scientist at DARPA; a research professor at MIT; President of Amazon’s R&D arm A9; VP & Director of Research at Intel; a senior leader in Microsoft’s Advanced Strategy and Research division. Smart companies have wooed him in serial fashion. Now David is VMware Chief Research Officer building and leading a stellar team, and over several months into 2018 we had some great conversations about where VMware had been and was going, and what I could bring to that journey. I had a chance to speak with several of the dozens of Ph.D.s he has been hiring to flesh out a comprehensive R&D agenda. I excitedly joined recently and we’ve been off to the races.

For a 20-year-old startup, the company’s growing like gangbusters (the stock market obviously still loves it), and it ranks high every year on lists of Best Employers. But what really attracted me was the stress on R&D and innovation culture, driving an unbelievably ambitious vision. I had always been impressed by VMware’s early virtualization technology; at DIA we were pioneering federal customers fifteen years ago, and wound up using it as a foundation of what would become our private cloud infrastructure. But VMware scientists and research engineers took virtualization much further, with abstraction becoming almost addictively popular. After the server and the OS were virtualized, so was storage, and then networks, and then the data center itself. Now our research agenda is energetically broad, across the following areas:

In fact, any large complex orchestration of resources, hardware, and processes may actually be just the next big virtual machine. We intend to build it, with disruptively great software. In 2011, web pioneer and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen wrote a famous manifesto in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software is Eating the World”:

“More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.”

That’s why I smiled last month, just after joining VMware, when our CEO Pat Gelsinger rebuffed talk of him moving to Intel as that company’s new CTO. He began his career at Intel, was its first-ever CTO and the father of the fabled -486 processor. But today he’s virtualizing the world’s computational resources, and Pat tweeted his response to a CNBC anchor’s comments about the Intel CEO job: “I love being CEO of VMware and not going anywhere else. The future is software!”

I still intend to live in Virginia and work closely with DC government friends and colleagues on research, reflecting the Valley’s traditionally close working  partnership with the federal government. In fact, if you’re in a government position and are wondering “What’s going on inside VMware Research labs?” – drop me a line 🙂

Remembering Paul Kozemchak

It’s a sad, sad thing to lose a friend. To lose a good friend still in the prime of his life is tragic. Compounding it all, to lose a friend who has quietly been one of our nation’s most valuable national-security minds is just heartbreaking, on many, many levels.

That’s how I feel now that Paul Kozemchak, longtime senior leader at DARPA and one hell of a guy, has passed away.

The Washington Post ran a too-short obituary this week; I encourage you to read the full online tribute to Paul posted by his family, reflecting both his loving personality and his career’s breadth in service to the nation. I see from LinkedIn that one of his old endorsers there had simply written: “Paul knows more about the intelligence community that anyone else I know.” I could say the same thing, and I want to record a few personal thoughts and anecdotes.

Several months ago I began spending time advising a small DoD element, the Strategic Capabilities Office. I was excited about the work, in large part because of what SCO does, but also because it meant I’d be spending a lot of time at DARPA headquarters just outside Washington DC, where SCO has offices. If you like me grew up idolizing the future-inventing wizards of DARPA, you can imagine the thrill I had getting a DARPA badge, and logging in with a personal account on the actual ARPANET.

But that was only partly why I was stoked – it was mostly because I’d be able to see Paul Kozemchak frequently, or “PK” as everyone knew him. Paul has been working at DARPA for over a quarter of a century. I first met him over a decade ago while I was at DIA, and he was the well-established special advisor to the DARPA Director, and its liaison to the intelligence community. When I joined Microsoft’s Advanced Strategy and Research group in December 2007, I was delighted to invite senior government technologists to Redmond, for peek-behind-the-curtain visits to MSR labs and information-sharing on jointly-relevant research. Paul was the first person I invited, and that trip back to Redmond in the spring of 2008 was a blast. I got to know him better as a brilliantly incisive analyst, a laugh-a-minute wit, a bon vivant, an all-too-correct conspiracy theorist on world events, and most of all as a friend.

So, in September 2017 I drove to DARPA headquarters, to work in SCO’s offices on day one, and on the street outside as I searched for the parking entrance, whom did I see striding ebulliently along the sidewalk but PK. I pulled over, rolled my window down and hollered “Paul!” He hadn’t known I was coming, and was delighted. Thus began a weeks-long series of short snatches of conversation in the hallway or the lobby, each time PK saying “We’ve got to get together in the SCIF, big stuff.” We made tentative plans, canceled, remade, shifted…

Those short moments were all I was going to have. Paul was struck by a car as he was crossing that same street outside DARPA headquarters, on November 10. In the hospital, his family was with him a week later when he passed away. The memorial service is tomorrow.

I mentioned PK on this blog way back in 2008 (right). In the ten years since there’ve been dinners, lunches, a million emails urbane or profane, late-night phone calls, several more trips together to the west coast, drinks on Capitol Hill… Others had the same experience, knew him longer or better, worked on more projects with him; Paul was extraordinarily popular in the euphemistic “certain circles” of DC.

From 2011-2017 I had the pleasure of serving alongside Paul on Jim Clapper’s “Intelligence Community Strategic Studies Group,” the DNI in-house thinktank of outside advisors and former IC S&T folks now in industry. We carpooled to meetings sometimes. (Paul was a master at bumming rides to Metro, which stretched into front-door-of-DARPA delivery because he was always in the middle of a fascinating story.) The ICSSG performed classified studies on demand, as a kind of red-cell or alternative-analysis team, including one short effort I led to explore “The Future of Intelligence” – Paul was on my group for that, and every meeting was a richly rewarding seminar for me, learning from him.

I’ll leave for future tributes his career contributions, but they were quiet and many, as he began his career during what is now called “the Second Offset” and was a nudging promoter for the birth of the Third Offset. The context and sense of history he brought to any topic were hard to rival. PK had studied under – and then worked with – one of the Cold War’s leading theoreticians, the titan Albert Wohlstetter (“one of the great defense intellectuals of the 20th century” per a Boston Globe profile, which mentions Paul among his protégés). PK was a figure from that founding era of a half-century of strategic stability amid global chaos. It’s difficult even now to think of future IC strategy meetings with no Kozemchak present to perturb and disrupt the groupthink, typically with wit and panache…

I always thought he had the best job in DC, at the interchange of invention and intelligence. Here’s a jokey email exchange from last summer, when DARPA’s director position was open:

Paul has also been a longtime fixture in our AFCEA Intelligence Committee (I described that here), and since 2010 I’ve listened as he enlightened that elite body at its monthly meetings, typically sharing an unknown R&D advance (ours or theirs) with, “Here’s something this group should know.” It always was.

Paul was always an energetic partner in planning and executing AFCEA’s annual classified Spring Intelligence Symposium, and I remember – for example – many fun moments leading up to the 2015 symposium, when we planned to have Elon Musk as our featured keynote interview, which I was to conduct onstage. It was going to be our big finale on the final afternoon of the symposium, timed to hold the audience in their seats to the end. Paul helped me devise a series of penetrating questions designed to drive Elon into a discussion of the national-security implications of AI and autonomy; he had just been helping the Defense Science Board with a landmark study on the topic. Then came word from Musk’s team that he would have to leave early – could we shift the schedule an hour? Paul volunteered to swap his own session on “S&T for Anticipatory Intelligence” to the final slot – gambling that the sell-out crowd wouldn’t just up and leave after Elon departed the stage. As I introduced Paul after getting rid of Elon, I cracked to the audience, “And now what you’ve all been waiting for, Paul Kozemchak, the only man in DC big enough to have Elon Musk as an opening act.”

Here’s a photo from that session, with Paul (left) smiling as ever over his index cards, having posed an elegantly insightful question to IARPA Director Peter Highnam:

I’m sad I’ll never again hear Paul ask another question, pose another challenge, solve another puzzle, make another joke. And the irony of having joined him in the DARPA building only to lose his friendship so quickly makes me even sadder.

It has made me look up something I recalled from years ago reading Tip O’Neill’s autobiography. That legendary Speaker of the House, who popularized the line “All politics is local,” had early on memorized a poem, which he was fond of reciting in packed Boston pubs or meeting halls throughout his career. It’s about friendship and staying in touch with old friends. I’ll close with the poem, and the thought of seeing PK one last time.

Around The Corner 

by Charles Hanson Towne (1877-1949)

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.

And I never see my old friend’s face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell.

And he rang mine but we were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.
Tired of playing a foolish game,
Tired of trying to make a name.

“Tomorrow” I say! “I will call on Jim
Just to show that I’m thinking of him,”
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner, yet miles away,
“Here’s a telegram sir,” “Jim died today.”
And that’s what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

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When Public Meets Private in Intelligence

Today’s the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the American homeland, the sequence of events which wound up bringing me from Silicon Valley to Washington DC in 2002, and a stint working in the Intelligence Community. I notice today that no one asks me anymore, as they often did at first back then, why I was so intent on bridging the gap between DC and the Valley (broadly, not geographically, defined).

Today it surprises few when we do something unorthodox like invite Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos to appear inside an intelligence agency earlier this year, for a probing one-on-one at the AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium with several hundred IC professionals about the rapid changes in technology, views on public/private collaboration, and the impacts of AI and robotics on his business and theirs.

Onstage with Amazon/Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos, at the AFCEA 2017 Spring Intelligence Symposium

Onstage with Amazon/Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos, at the AFCEA 2017 Spring Intelligence Symposium

Onstage with Amazon/Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos, at the AFCEA 2017 Spring Intelligence Symposium

That rapid pace of change continues to accelerate, following its own Moore’s-Law-like curve, and daily one sees a blurring between how “intelligence” is performed in government uses and out among the public. To wit, check out this article from early August:

News Item: BuzzFeed News Trained A Computer To Search For Hidden Spy Planes. This Is What We Found … Surveillance aircraft often keep a low profile: The FBI, for example, registers its planes to fictitious companies to mask their true identity. So BuzzFeed News trained a computer to find them by letting a machine-learning algorithm sift for planes with flight patterns that resembled those operated by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security… First we made a series of calculations to describe the flight characteristics of almost 20,000 planes in the four months of Flightradar24 data: their turning rates, speeds and altitudes flown, the areas of rectangles drawn around each flight path, and the flights’ durations. We also included information on the manufacturer and model of each aircraft, and the four-digit squawk codes emitted by the planes’ transponders. Then we turned to an algorithm called the “random forest,” training it to distinguish between the characteristics of two groups of planes: almost 100 previously identified FBI and DHS planes, and 500 randomly selected aircraft. The random forest algorithm makes its own decisions about which aspects of the data are most important. But not surprisingly, given that spy planes tend to fly in tight circles, it put most weight on the planes’ turning rates. We then used its model to assess all of the planes, calculating a probability that each aircraft was a match for those flown by the FBI and DHS… The algorithm was not infallible: Among other candidates, it flagged several skydiving operations that circled in a relatively small area, much like a typical surveillance aircraft. But as an initial screen for candidate spy planes, it proved very effective. In addition to aircraft operated by the US Marshals and the military contractor Acorn Growth Companies, covered in our previous stories, it highlighted a variety of planes flown by law enforcement, and by the military and its contractors. Some of these aircraft use technologies that challenge our assumptions about when and how we’re being watched, tracked, or listened to. It’s only by understanding when and how these technologies are used from the air that we’ll be able to debate the balance between effective law enforcement, national security, and individual privacy.”

It has become commonplace to observe the dwindling distinctions in use of so-called “intelligence capabilities” between longstanding government intelligence agencies and so-called private-sector companies, e.g. news outlets or social-media platforms.  For a tour-de-force expression and stirring point-of-view argument you will profit from reading John Lanchester’s new and epic book-review essay “You Are the Product” in the London Review of Books, in which he treats Google, Microsoft, Facebook and the like with a critical lens and concludes:

[E]ven more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company….”

A short blog piece is not the place to examine fully this rich topic, but it is a good place to point out that I enjoy spending time helping all sides of this divide understand each other. By all sides, I mean government entities and officers (including intelligence and law enforcement), private-sector companies, and most importantly the public citizenry and customer base of those organizations. A great forum for doing that has been AFCEA, which this past week co-hosted with INSA the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in DC. Along with helping oversee the agenda I had the opportunity to organize one of the panel sessions with my old friend (and former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence) Carmen Medina.

w/ Carmen Medina (@milouness) in front row #Intelligence2017 great panel she & I organized on Intelligence in the Future Threat Environment pic.twitter.com/cFTukgPvCB

— Lewis Shepherd (@lewisshepherd) September 7, 2017

Our panel – very relevant to the above discussion – was on “The Role of Intelligence in the Future Threat Environment,” and our excellent participants addressed some gnarly problems. I tweeted many of the comments and observations (see my hashtagged feed here), and you can find more content and videos from all 15 sessions archived here.

Your suggestions on new approaches to these dialogues are welcome as always. As we commemorate the horrific surprise attacks of 9/11/2001, in a rapidly changing world where real-time surveillance is performed by more and more entities, governmental and commercial, it is increasingly important to engage in thoughtful – and sometimes urgent – discussion about who watches whom, and why.