Amy B. Zegart
Auteur de Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
A propos de l'auteur
Amy B. Zegart is associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC.
Œuvres de Amy B. Zegart
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- Œuvres
- 8
- Membres
- 218
- Popularité
- #102,474
- Évaluation
- 3.8
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 15
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- 1
For example, I want every telephone conversation in to and out from my business recorded and transcribed.
I want every conversation in the store recorded and transcribed. Every e-mail, text, message board note, comment on social media, and posting collected, centralized, and indexed. I want it all indexed by the need enunciated and products quoted.
Then I would know even better than my customers what they want before they themselves know it. That, I tell myself, is the ultimate cure to the high volume, low margin business I have inexcusably wedded myself to. Total control of the universe of conversation about the business horizon is my ticket to riches.
Or so I want to believe.
These dreams sprung to mind reading Amy B. Zegart’s excellent if sometimes turgid analysis of the challenges confronting the US intelligence community in the 21st Century and beyond.
What was once thought to be the precinct of tactical intelligence agencies is now thrown open to any yahoo with enough computing power to plumb the depths of data, and propaganda, and information design.
Governments have so much access to the universe of information, they could beat me to it. And if they can, so can the cyber criminals.
Cyber threats are the new frontier of Cold War. It is active now and growing exponentially. How governments confront the new challenge may ultimately determine which nation-states rise and which fall.
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of government snooping in the public information highways sewed a new sense of what initiatives governments are now taking to corral the Tsunami of information.
More recent revelations about Russian interference in US elections, of Israeli/US involvement in the Stutznet worm attack on Iran centrifuges, the NotPetya attacks on the Ukrainian power grids, shows that the war is active.
And what makes it feel crazy is that even now the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable info spying are blurry.
Watching the destruction of Ukraine from afar leads us to ask: “When and why did this war begin?” It didn’t start in February when Russian troopers crossed the boundary into western Ukraine. And it didn’t start when Russia occupied Crimea or when “little green men” flooded into the eastern regions of Ukraine.
It began as a concerted cyberwar against Ukraine years before, even though world leaders — perhaps even Ukrainian leaders themselves — ignored the telltale signs of aggression.
This identification of the new war scape by the international community is sadly missing. And this is what the Intelligence Community, not only of the United States, but all states need to establish fast.
The vastness of the information landscape, the crossing of real and cyber borders, identifying cyber culprits quickly, the viability of punishing state-sponsored and non-state cyber actors, all rise in importance.
Today we are seeing how and why these actors hack and minds not only machines, how they expose the weak links between the people and trust in their governments.
Zegart also explains the difference between conventional and cyber weapons. A tank is a tank is tank. But a cyber weapon, like a zero-day exploit, once cracked can be shut down forever.
She also spends very useful time exposing the organizational weakness inherent in the construction and management of the US Intelligence Community. During the study of the post-9/11 attacks, legislators learned how siloing information led to missing the imminent threats. Excessive secrecy and classification of information also keep important people from seeing the threats from abroad and from the potential for illegal spying at home.
She shows how American legislators are poorly equipped to evaluate their intelligence investments and how the US system of government minimizes the incentives for members of Congress to want to spend time on these issues. Congressional oversight is weak in the US, and I, as a Canadian, can vouch that government oversight of intelligence operations are no better in Canada.
Undoubtedly, oversight in many jurisdictions falls way short.
Finally, it should not escape notice that private corporations exert enormous influence on the information landscape. They wield power that governments can hardly contain. When corporations get hacked they cry foul, but corporations are hacking us. Big time.
Should the biggest businesses be censured or broken up and classified as cyber-mafias?
Thus the challenge of cyber to the spys and spy catchers in this world is extremely worrisome. Chinese spying on corporations and the US government is big. But the threat of big data is that other players can do equally big damage with open source and not so open source materials.… (plus d'informations)