Spies, Lies, and Algorithms (Princeton University Press), by Amy B. Zegart

Expand

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms

During the Cold War, U.S. intelligence agencies focused on a single foe, the Soviet Union. Now, bad actors are everywhere enabled by new technology. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are only the most prominent players with agendas contrary to America’s sense of power and wellbeing. With cyberspace contested and Internet security an oxymoron, even private citizens can expose state secrets and upend the best-laid plans.

Amy Zegart, who worked for the National Security Council before becoming a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, summarizes the rapidly mutating situation in Spies, Lies, and Algorithms. She puts it well. “For most of history, power and geography provided security. The strong threatened the weak, not the other way around,” she writes. Whether WikiLeaks or ISIS, nonstate actors can use the new technology to devastating ends. The CIA and NSA are faced with unsurmountable mountains of data, including tweets and social media posts as well as email and phone calls. Covert action is harder than ever. During the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, his neighbor across the street live tweeted the commando operation.

“Data is democratizing, and American spy agencies are struggling to keep up,” she writes, adding that sometimes wide access to data has worked for good. Citizen volunteers sifted through the vast array of selfies and other self-incriminating footage thoughtlessly taken by the Jan. 6 miscreants, helping to identify many of them. However, Julian Assange’s gleeful data sharing with Moscow (was he also a Trump supporter?) is the other side of the issue. The balance between legitimate secrecy and the need for openness in a democracy is hard to walk, and the U.S. government often errs on the side of secrecy, Zegard concludes.

Description: Amy Zegart, who worked for the National Security Council before becoming a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, summarizes the rapidly mutating intelligence situation in Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.