Amy Zegart, "How Technology Is Changing American Intelligence"

In this talk, Zegart examines the past, present, and future of American espionage, focusing on how emerging technologies are radically challenging every aspect of the intelligence enterprise. An illuminating case study is nuclear threat detection. Zegart will share her findings that nuclear intelligence is not just for superpower governments anymore thanks to Internet connectivity, automated analytics, and commercial satellites. This talk will focus on the characteristics, benefits, and risks of this democratization of intelligence for threat detection and crisis management. Zegart will also discuss how technology is not a panacea for the intelligence community, how it can exacerbate existing biases, and how it must be used strategically to provide critical insights to the military, policymakers, and the American public.

Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies and national security, grand strategy, and global political risk management.

Zegart has been featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. Most recently, she served a member of the 2022 CFR “Confronting Reality in Cyberspace” Task Force, a commissioner on the 2020 CSIS Technology and Intelligence Task Force, and an advisor to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

The most recent of her five book projects is Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, which was just released in February of this year. She has also authored Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (2007), co-authored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity(2018) with Condoleezza Rice, and co-edited Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (2019) with Herbert Lin.

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