Quotes from Amy B. Zegart

Anything running on code and connected to the Internet is a potential cyberattack vector. This global battlespace changes every time anyone on earth downloads an app, installs a patch, inserts a thumb drive, connects to airport Wi-Fi, or plugs in a smart toaster.

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work wrote, "AI is accelerating innovation in every scientific and engineering endeavor."5 Not since electricity has a breakthrough technology ushered in so much potential promise and peril.

populations at scale. There is greater upheaval still to come. In 2019, Google announced it had achieved "quantum supremacy"—a computing breakthrough so powerful that a math problem a supercomputer would need ten thousand years to solve could be cracked by its machine in just three minutes and twenty seconds.

Because living cells are programmable like computers, they could eventually be engineered to make just about anything. Potential uses include manufacturing plastics, creating plants that can detect chemical munitions by changing color, and even designing bioweapons that target individuals on the basis of their DNA.12 Here, too, Chinese military leaders have made innovation a top priority, calling biotech the new "strategic commanding heights" of national defense.

Securing advantage in this new world means that intelligence agencies must find new ways to work with private sector companies to combat online threats and harness commercial technological advances. They must engage the universe of open-source data to capture the power of its insights. And they must serve a broader array of intelligence customers outside of government to defend the nation.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are, too. Although some companies have declared they will never use their technology for weapons, the reality is their technology already is a weapon: hackers are attacking computer networks through Gmail phishing schemes and Microsoft coding vulnerabilities, terrorists are livestreaming attacks, and malign actors have turned social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook into disinformation superhighways that undermine democracy from within.

Technological advances (like the Internet) used to start in government and then migrate to the commercial sector.52 Now that process is reversed, with breakthroughs coming from large companies like Google and Nvidia and from startups like Ginko Bioworks and Dataminr.

Satellites are not just getting better; they are getting more plentiful. According to then Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, the number of satellite launches more than doubled between 2016 and 2018.44 In 2018 alone, 322 small satellites about the size of a shoebox were hurled into space. The Paris-based firm Euroconsult estimates that more than eight thousand small satellites will be launched between 2019 and 2028.

In 2000, approximately 15 percent of the world's population was connected to the Internet.51 Today, more than half the world is online, and more people are estimated to have mobile phones than access to running water.

There is no farm-state equivalent for intelligence, no geographic center of industry or interests that encourages legislators to focus on intelligence oversight to win voter support. As Michael Hayden told me, "No member ever gets a bridge built or a road paved by serving on the intelligence committee. It's an act of patriotism.

Congress has many more powdered milk experts than intelligence experts. Of the 535 members serving in the 116th Congress, only eighteen ever worked in an intelligence agency, but dozens of representatives came from dairy districts in New York, Wisconsin, Vermont, Texas, and elsewhere. That's better than it used to be. In 2009, only two members of Congress had prior intelligence careers.114 The same year, the Congressional Dairy Farmers Caucus was founded with more than fifty members.115

From 1976 to 2005, Senate rules limited service on the intelligence committee to just eight years.116 House rules still impose term limits for the intelligence committee117 but almost no other committees.118 The result: Just when legislators become experts, they are forced to stop overseeing the Intelligence Community.

Fewer longtermers means more rookies. In the 103rd Congress (1993–1995), one of the highest turnover periods, 11 of 19 House Intelligence Committee members and 7 of 17 Senate Intelligence Committee members were serving for the first time.

Deterrence entails warning an adversary, "If you do that, you'll regret it." All parents are deterrence experts, threatening punishment to shape behavior: "If you hit your brother, you'll lose your dessert / television time / phone.

In 2018, the Pentagon moved from hunkering down and defending American computer systems against incoming attacks to embracing a proactive, take-the-fight-to-them-every-day strategy called Defend Forward.

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.

Together, these four nations are behind 77 percent of all suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks since 2005.

If cybercrime were a country, it would rank in the top twenty-five in terms of annual GDP.

Many nations steal online, but North Korea is particularly aggressive, targeting financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to steal billions to fund its illicit nuclear weapons program.66

China's intellectual property theft strikes at the heart of economic power. It was considered so serious, Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation's top cyberwarrior, called it "the greatest transfer of wealth in history.