Quotes from Amy B. Zegart

The most serious threats from a national security perspective don't come from Cheeto-eating teens. They come from well-trained operatives and proxies operating at the behest of four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.62 Together, these four nations are behind 77 percent of all suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks since 2005.

While running a wide range, the cyberattacks perpetrated by China Russia, Iran, and North Korea come in five basic types: stealing, spying, disrupting, destroying, and deceiving.

The world out there is inherently hard to understand and human brains are not wired to understand it well.

In 2018 cyber theft cost an estimated $600 billion globally. That's about as much as the global illicit drug trade.65 If cybercrime were a country, it would rank in the top twenty-five in terms of annual GDP.

because it is designed to secure national advantage. China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of intellectual property,67 including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs, two of the most sophisticated aircraft in the U.S. arsenal.

MacArthur suffered an extreme case of very common afflictions. He allowed optimism to cloud his assessment of facts, discounted evidence that contradicted his prior beliefs, and built a team around him that discouraged dissent

Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation's top cyberwarrior, called it "the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

The foreseeability of the world out there varies in systematic ways for systematic reasons.

It's difficult for analysts to get better at predicting when they don't know if their past predictions were ever any good.30

NSA has been penetrating foreign communications systems for over half a century. It has the highest concentration of the best cyber expertise in government, employing more mathematicians than any organization in the United States.154 As former NSA Director Michael Hayden wrote, cyber weapons descend from an NSA bloodline.

Put most simply, intelligence is information that gives policymakers an advantage over their adversaries.

Knowledge never guarantees perfect decisions, but it does reduce uncertainty, which makes better decisions more likely.

Volume is key. Twitter now estimates that Russia used more than fifty thousand automated accounts or bots to Tweet election-related content during the 2016 presidential campaign. Twitter and Facebook are the best-known disinformation superhighways, but there are many others. Russian officers have infiltrated everything from 4chan to Pinterest.

It's hard to overstate just how foreign the worlds of Washington and Silicon Valley are to each other. At the exact moment when great-power conflict is making a comeback and harnessing technology is the key to success, Silicon Valley and Washington are still working on working together.

People tend to seek and latch on to information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs while avoiding, disregarding, or minimizing evidence that challenges them.

Now, data is democratizing, and American spy agencies are struggling to keep up. More than half the world is online,25 conducting five billion Google searches each day.26 Cell phone users are recording and posting events in real-time—turning everyone into intelligence collectors, whether they know it or not.27 Anyone with an Internet connection can access Google Earth satellite imagery, identify people using facial recognition software, and track events on Twitter.

The sheer volume of online data today is so staggering, it's hard to comprehend: in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and posted 350 million photos on Facebook every day.29 Some estimate that the amount of information on earth is doubling every two years.30 This kind of publicly available information is called open-source intelligence and it is becoming increasingly valuable.

As former CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote, covert action "is a hard business of agonizing choices.

In addition, as discussed in chapter 4, working in an intelligence agency is not a job. It's a mission.

Cofer Black, who directed the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, once told a colleague that he wanted Osama bin Laden's head shipped back in a box of dry ice.26 Black also assured President George W. Bush after 9/11, "When we're through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs."27 Among Bush's closest advisors, Black came to be known as the "flies on the eyeballs guy."28

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that analysis is how we try not to fool ourselves.129

Perhaps the most serious objection is what Tetlock calls the "wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy," the risk of being charged with "failure" when an event doesn't happen even when the intelligence estimate claimed there was only a 70 percent chance that it would. When it comes to likelihood, we tend to conflate maybe with sure thing.87

Many countries' intelligence services spy on their own citizens. In 2018, China spent more on internal security than external defense.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to believe that others behave badly because of their personality while we ourselves behave badly because of factors beyond our control. People often jump to blaming others while letting themselves off the hook. Drivers think that someone cutting them off must be a jerk rather than wondering if there's an emergency or some other reason requiring them to drive that way.