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.

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!

 

 

 

 

Problem Number One, Watching for Superintelligence

Two years ago, the AFCEA Intelligence Committee (I’m a member) invited Elon Musk for a special off-the-record session at our annual classified Spring Intelligence Symposium. The Committee assigned me the task of conducting a wide-ranging on-stage conversation with him, going through a variety of topics, but we spent much of our time on artificial intelligence (AI) – and particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI, or “superintelligence”).

I mention that the session was off-the-record. In my own post back in 2015 about the session, I didn’t characterize Elon’s side of the conversation or his answers to my questions – but for flavor I did include the text of one particular question on AI which I posed to him. I thought it was the most important question I asked…

(Our audience that day: the 600 attendees included a top-heavy representation of the Intelligence Community’s leadership, its foremost scientists and technologists, and executives from the nation’s defense and national-security private-sector partners.)

Here’s that one particular AI question I asked, quoted from my blogpost of 7/28/2015:

“AI thinkers like Vernor Vinge talk about the likelihood of a “Soft takeoff” of superhuman intelligence, when we might not even notice and would simply be adapting along; vs a Hard takeoff, which would be a much more dramatic explosion – akin to the introduction of Humans into the animal kingdom. Arguably, watching for indicators of that type of takeoff (soft or especially hard) should be in the job-jar of the Intelligence Community. Your thoughts?”

Months after that AFCEA session, in December 2015 Elon worked with Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and several others to establish and fund OpenAI, “a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence (AGI).” OpenAI says it has a full-time staff of 60 researchers and engineers, working “to build safe AGI, and ensure AGI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.”

Fast-forward to today. Over the weekend I was reading through a variety of AI research and sources, keeping current in general for some of my ongoing consulting work for Deloitte’s Mission Analytics group. I noticed something interesting on the OpenAI website, specifically on a page it posted several months ago labelled “Special Projects.”

There are four such projects listed, described as “problems which are not just interesting, but whose solutions matter.” Interested researchers are invited to apply for a position at OpenAI to work on the problem – and they’re all interesting, and could lead to consequential work.

But the first Special Project problem caught my eye, because of my question to Musk the year before:

1. Detect if someone is using a covert breakthrough AI system in the world. As the number of organizations and resources allocated to AI research increases, the probability increases that an organization will make an undisclosed AI breakthrough and use the system for potentially malicious ends. It seems important to detect this. We can imagine a lot of ways to do this — looking at the news, financial markets, online games, etc.”

That reads to me like a classic “Indications & Warning” problem statement from the “other” non-AI world of intelligence.

I&W (in the parlance of the business) is a process used by defense intelligence and the IC to detect indicators of potential threats while sufficient time still exists to counter those efforts. The doctrine of seeking advantage through warning is as old as the art of war; Sun Tzu called it “foreknowledge.” There are many I&W examples from the Cold War, from the overall analytic challenge (see a classic thesis  “Anticipating Surprise“), and from specific domain challenge (see for example this 1978 CIA study, Top Secret but since declassified, on “Indications and Warning of Soviet Intentions to Use Chemical Weapons during a NATO-Warsaw Pact War“).

The I&W concept has sequentially been transferred to new domains of intelligence like Space/Counter-Space (see the 2013 DoD “Joint Publication on Space Operations Doctrine,” which describes the “unique characteristics” of the space environment for conducting I&W, whether from orbit or in other forms), and of course since 9/11 the I&W approach has been applied intensely in counter-terrorist realms in defense and homeland security.

It’s obvious Elon Musk and his OpenAI cohort believe that superintelligence is a problem worth watching. Elon’s newest company, the brain-machine-interface startup Neuralink, sets its core motivation as avoiding a future in which AGI outpaces simple human intelligence. So I’m staying abreast of indications of AGI progress.

For the AGI domain I am tracking many sources through citations and published research (see OpenAI’s interesting list here), and watching for any mention of I&W monitoring attempts or results by others which meet the challenge of what OpenAI cites as solving “Problem #1.” So far, nothing of note.

But I’ll keep a look out, so to speak.

 

 

Coming to DC, One-Day Delivery from Jeff Bezos

If you read this blog you care about government and technology. And whether you’re a technologist or not, you can see the tech forces shaping and sharpening the uses of digital capabilities in accomplishing the ends of government, whether that’s citizen-service delivery and local law enforcement, or global diplomacy and nation-state combat. I’ve worked on and written about them all – from intelligence to space to AI, or the quantification of Supreme Court humor, even “Punk Rock and Moore’s Law.”

Understanding and forecasting that radical pace of external change is difficult for government professionals, and they need help doing that. Let’s say you wanted to tap someone to offer insight. Who’d be on your dream list? At the top of my dream list – my absolute “if-only-I-could-ask” list – would be Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

So I’m going to sit down with Jeff Bezos on stage later this month, at the annual AFCEA Intelligence Symposium, for a conversation about areas where technology critically intersects with the nation’s response to enduring challenges and opportunities, such as artificial intelligence, digital innovation, the revolution in cloud computing, and commercial space operations. (I serve as national Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee at AFCEA, the 35,000-member Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association.)

The 2017 Symposium features, as usual, a stellar line-up of top leaders in national security, with panels on Advanced Conventional Threats, the Contested Environment of Space, Terrorism, Cyber Threats from Nation-States and Non-State Entities, and Gray-Zone Conflicts/Hybrid Warfare (topic of last year’s Defense Science Board study on which I sat). All sessions feature senior thought-leaders from government and industry.

Jeff Bezos might be new in that particular mix, but you can understand why we invited him. He has been TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year (early in his career in 1999), Fortune Magazine’s Businessperson of the Year, topped the Forbes annual list of “World’s Greatest Leaders,” and our rationale for this conversation is his long track record of revolutionary contributions to international technological/economic advance, as well as to US national security. AWS is now of central importance to the public sector (including intelligence), and the broader contributions of Amazon and Blue Origin to the nation’s economic future and success are incalculable.

 

If you have a Top Secret/SI/TK clearance, you can attend the Symposium – register. [Update: sorry, 2017 Symposium = sold out]

There’s a longstanding meme that government should be “run like a business.” I typically don’t think in precisely those terms, having been on both sides and recognizing the significant differences in intent and stakeholders.

Panel on Defense Innovation and DIUx

I’ve been more interested in helping each sector understand the unique contributions of the other, and the complexities inherent in their relationship. (See for example my recent post on DoD Innovation and DIUx in Silicon Valley.)

But the “run government like a business” impetus is understandable here in the United States as a reflection of dissatisfaction with government performance in meeting its own goals, and the expectations of the citizens it serves. President Trump recently assigned Jared Kushner to lead a new White House Office of American Innovation, and Kushner told the Washington Post “We should have excellence in government. The government should be run like a great American company.” The Washington Post (coincidentally owned by, yes, Jeff Bezos) ran a piece exploring the history of that thinking, dating its surge in popularity to the early 1980s under President Reagan – a timeline borne out by running the phrase through Google’s Ngram Viewer (see chart).

The last time I invited a smart young billionaire to come speak to Intelligence Community leaders, it worked out pretty well for the audience (see “Burning Man and AI: What Elon Musk told me and the role of Art“). So I’m aiming even higher this year…

If you don’t have a Top Secret clearance, you can’t get into the Symposium, and won’t be able to hear Bezos firsthand on April 27. But here’s a substitute, nearly as good: this week Bezos published his annual Letter to Shareholders of Amazon. Most people in the business world know about his legendary 1997 “first annual letter to shareholders” in which he laid out an extraordinary long-term vision for his company. The 2017 version is also extraordinary, and I urge you to read it in full. My friend Jeff Jonas, former IBM Chief Scientist for Context Computing and now founder/Chief Scientist at Senzing, calls it “the most impressive annual letter to shareholders I’ve ever read; this line of thinking leads to greatness.”

– – – – –

For some parting eye-candy, here’s video from last week’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, where attendees got a first-hand look at the historic Blue Origin New Shepard rocket booster (first to land vertically after spaceflight, first to relaunch again, and now a five-time-reuse trophy), and an inside tour of the crew capsule with “the largest windows in space travel.”

 

 

Docere et Facere, To Teach and To Do

“Helping aspiring data scientists forge their own career paths, more universities are offering programs in data science or analytics.” – Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017

George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman provides the maxim, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Most of us know this as “Those who can’t do, teach.” (And Woody Allen added a punch line in Annie Hall: “… and those who can’t teach, teach gym.”)

I’m determined both to do and to teach, because I enjoy each of them. When it comes to data and advanced analytics, something I’ve been using or abusing my entire career, I’m excited about expanding what I’m doing. So below I’m highlighting two cool opportunities I’m engaging in now…

 

Teaching Big Data Architectures and Analytics in the IC

I’ve just been asked by the government to teach again a popular graduate course I’ve been doing for several years, “Analytics: Big Data to Information.” It’s a unique course, taught on-site for professionals in the U.S. intelligence community, and accredited by George Mason University within GMU’s Volgenau Graduate School of Engineering. My course is the intro Big Data course for IC professionals earning a master’s or Ph.D. from GMU’s Department of Information Sciences and Technology, as part of the specialized Directorate for Intelligence Community Programs.

I enjoy teaching enormously, not having done it since grad school at Stanford a million years ago (ok, the ’80s). The students in the program are hard-working data scientists, technologists, analysts, and program managers from a variety of disciplines within the IC, and they bring their A-game to the classroom. I can’t share the full syllabus, but here’s a summary:

This course is taught as a graduate-level discussion/lecture seminar, with a Term Paper and end-of-term Presentation as assignments. Course provides an overview of Big Data and its use in commercial, scientific, governmental and other applications. Topics include technical and non-technical disciplines required to collect, process and use enormous amounts of data available from numerous sources. Lectures cover system acquisition, law and policy, and ethical issues. It includes discussions of technologies involved in collecting, mining, analyzing and using results, with emphasis on US Government environments.

I worry that mentioning this fall’s class now might gin up too much interest (last year I was told the waiting list had 30+ students who wanted to get in but couldn’t, and I don’t want to expand beyond a reasonable number), but when I agreed this week to offer the course again I immediately began thinking about the changes in the syllabus I may make. And I solicit your input in the comments below (or by email).

For the 2016 fall semester, I had to make many changes to keep up with technological advance, particularly in AI. I revamped and expanded the “Machine Learning Revolution” section, and beefed up the segments on algorithmic analytics and artificial intelligence, just to keep pace with advances in the commercial and academic research worlds. Several of the insights I used came from my onstage AI discussion with Elon Musk in 2015, and his subsequent support for the OpenAI initiative.

More importantly I provided my students (can’t really call them “kids” as they’re mid-career intelligence officials!) with tools and techniques for them to keep abreast of advances outside the walls of government – or those within the walls of non-U.S. government agencies overseas. So I’m going to have to do some work again this year, to keep the course au courant, and your insight is welcome.

But as noted at the beginning, I don’t want to just teach gym – I want to be athletic. So my second pursuit is news on the work front.

 

Joining an elite Mission Analytics practice

I’m announcing what I like to think of as the successful merger of two leading consultancies: my own solo gig and Deloitte Consulting. And I’m even happy Deloitte won the coin-toss to keep its name in our merger 🙂

For the past couple of years I have been a solo consultant and I’ve enjoyed working with some tremendous clients, including government leaders, established tech firms, and great young companies like SpaceX and LGS Innovations (which traces its lineage to the legendary Bell Labs).

But working solo has its limitations, chiefly in implementation of great ideas. Diagnosing a problem and giving advice to an organization’s leadership is one thing – pulling together a team of experts to execute a solution is entirely different. I missed the camaraderie of colleagues, and the “mass-behind-the-arrowhead” effect to force positive change.

When I left Microsoft, the first phone call I got was from an old intelligence colleague, Scott Large – the former Director of NRO who had recently joined Deloitte, the world’s leading consulting and professional services firm. Scott invited me over to talk. It took a couple of years for that conversation to culminate, but I decided recently to accept Deloitte’s irresistible offer to join its Mission Analytics practice, working with a new and really elite team of experts who understand advanced technologies, are developing new ones, and are committed to making a difference for government and the citizens it serves.

Our group is already working on some impressively disruptive solutions using massive-scale data, AI, and immersive VR/AR… it’s wild. And since I know pretty much all the companies working in these spaces, I decided to go with the broadest, deepest, and smartest team, with the opportunity for highest impact.

Who could turn down the chance to teach, and to do?

 

Video of DoD Innovation Discussion at Cybersecurity Summit

Earlier this week I wrote (“Beware the Double Cyber Gap“) about an upcoming Cybersecurity Summit, arranged by AFCEA-DC, for which I would be a panelist on innovation and emerging technologies for defense.

The Summit was a big success, and in particular I was impressed with the level and quality of interaction between the government participants and their private-sector counterparts, both on stage and off. Most of the sessions were filmed, and are now available at http://www.cybersecuritytv.net.

You can watch our panel’s video, “Partnering with Industry for Innovation,” and it will provide an up-to-the-moment view of how US Cyber Command and the Department of Defense as a whole are attacking the innovation challenge, featuring leadership from the USCYBERCOM Capabilities Development Group, and the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental. Solarflare CEO Russ Stern (a serial entrepreneur from California) and I offered some historical, technical, market, and regulatory context for the challenge those two groups face in finding the best technologies for national security. Most of my remarks are after the 16:00 minute mark; click the photo below to view the video:

From my remarks:

“I’m here to provide context. I’ve been in both these worlds – I came from Silicon Valley; I came to the Defense Intelligence Agency after 9/11, and found all of these broken processes, all of these discontinuities between American innovation & ingenuity on one hand, and the Defense Department & the IC & government at large…

Silicon was a development of government R&D money through Bell Labs, the original semiconductor; so we have to realize the context that there’s been a massive disruption in the divorcing of American industry and the technology industry, from the government and the pull of defense and defense needs. That divorcing has been extremely dramatic just in the past couple of years post-Snowden, emblematically exemplified with Apple telling the FBI, “No thanks, we don’t think we’ll help you on that national security case.”

So these kinds of efforts like DIUx are absolutely essential, but you see the dynamic here, the dynamic now is the dog chasing the tail – the Defense Department chasing what has become a massive globally disruptive and globally responsive technology industry…  This morning we had the keynote from Gen. Touhill, the new federal Chief Information Security Officer, and Greg told us that what’s driving information security, the entire industry and the government’s response to it is the Internet – through all its expressions, now Internet of Things and everything else – so let’s think about the massive disruption in the Internet just over the last five years.

Five years ago, the top ten Internet companies measured by eyeballs, by numbers of users, the Top 10 were all American companies, and it’s all the ones you can name: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo… Guess what, three years ago the first crack into that Top 10, only six of those companies were American companies, and four – Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Sohu – were Chinese companies. And guess what, today only five are American companies, and those five – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo – eighty percent or more of their users are non-U.S. Not one of those American internet companies has even twenty percent of their user-base being U.S. persons, U.S. citizens. Their market, four out of five of their users are global.

So when [DoD] goes to one of these CEOs and says, “Hey c’mon, you’re an American” – well, maybe, maybe not. That’s a tough case to sell. Thank God we have these people, with the guts and drive and the intellect to be able to try and make this case, that technological innovation can and must serve our national interest, but that’s an increasingly difficult case to make when [internet] companies are now globally mindsetted, globally incentivized, globally prioritizing constantly…”

Kudos to my fellow panelists for their insights, and their ongoing efforts, and to AFCEA for continuing its role in facilitating important government/industry partnerships.

Twitter Search as a Government case study

In addition to periodic think-pieces here at Shepherd’s Pi, I also contribute a monthly online column over at SIGNAL Magazine on topics relating to intelligence. This month I keyed off a recent discussion I had onstage at the 2015 AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium with Elon Musk, particularly a colloquy we had on implications of the emerging cleavage (post-Edward Snowden) between Silicon Valley technology companies and their erstwhile innovation partners, U.S. intelligence agencies.

Intelligence, Artificial and Existential

“Not to Be or Not to Be?” artwork by Shuwit, http://shuwit.deviantart.com/

I just published a short piece over at SIGNAL Magazine on an increasingly public debate over artificial intelligence, which the editor gave a great Shakespearean title echoing Hamlet’s timeless question “To be, or not to be”:

Meet the Future-Makers

Question: Why did Elon Musk just change his Twitter profile photo? I notice he’s now seeming to evoke James Bond or Dr. Evil:

I’m not certain, but I think I know the answer why. Read on…

Young Americans and the Intelligence Community

A few days ago I travelled down to Orlando – just escaping the last days of the DC winter. I was invited to participate in a conference hosted by the Intelligence Community’s Center of Academic Excellence (IC CAE) at the University of Central Florida.  The title of my speech was “The Internet, 2015-2025: Business and Policy Challenges for the Private Sector.” But I actually learned as much as I taught, maybe more.