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- [00:03]
Dina Temple Rast
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here.
- [00:15]
General Paul Nakasone
In the future, we need policymakers who code and coders who understand policy.
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Dina Temple Rast
And you don't think we have that now?
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General Paul Nakasone
Well, my experience over the past six years leading both NSA and Cyber Command is that we are perhaps a little short of that.
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Dina Temple Rast
From Recorded Future News, this is Click Here's Mic Drop a longer listen to one of our most compelling interviews of the week. I'm Dina Temple Rast and today, something urgent and revealing an extended interview with General Paul Nakasone. He once sat at the helm of the NSA and US Cyber Command, and now he's deep in the heart of Tennessee building something unexpected at Vanderbilt University. He's not just reflecting on America's most pressing cyber problems, he's actually building a coalition to confront them.
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General Paul Nakasone
Right now, I don't want something that's going to solve something 10 or 20 years down the road. We've got a problem now, so let's get ideas and let's start to test them.
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Dina Temple Rast
He's doing more than just talking about these problems. Later this month, he brings together some of the nation's best thinkers at a summit at Vanderbilt on modern conflict and emerging threats.
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General Paul Nakasone
Everything from AI's broad impact on the nation to biopharma to looking at the changing nature of conflict to how does AI impact the Indo Pacific region?
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Dina Temple Rast
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General Paul Nakasone
Talent.
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Dina Temple Rast
Talent has been a constant for Nakasone. The one thing he has consistently said could alter the trajectory of national security. But it has to be cultivated every quarter.
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General Paul Nakasone
When I was The Director of NSA and Commander U.S. cyber Command, I would fly to the west coast to see what was the latest in technology. Inevitably, everyone that talked to me was half my age and I'd come back to D.C. and I'd be at the table and I'd be one of the younger guys at the table. And it just told me at that point that we needed a new generation of young people that were going to come and look at government service differently.
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Dina Temple Rast
That disconnect between government and innovation haunted him. So when he left government, that's where he decided to focus.
- [04:44]
General Paul Nakasone
And when Vanderbilt University called, I was very interested.
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Dina Temple Rast
Vanderbilt University, not the Pentagon, not Langley. Nashville is where he launched the Institute of National Security. And it's where a new generation of coders, analysts and strategists is being forged. Not in war rooms, but in classrooms. Are you actually teaching?
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General Paul Nakasone
I'm not teaching. I'm running the institute now.
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Dina Temple Rast
Some say his presence alone, a four star general among students, signals a change.
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General Paul Nakasone
The national security paradigm had changed from even the time when I came in at the end of the Cold War to something now that is really somewhere between competition, crisis and conflict. The other change are the knowledge, skills and abilities that young people can bring today to incredibly challenging problems in our national security. Think about the ability to code. Think about the ability be able to leverage big data. Think about the ability to have machine learning. Think about the ideas of Quantum as we consider a future that's much different than today. I wanted to make it exciting as for them, as it was for me when I entered a long time ago.
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Dina Temple Rast
And to hear him talk about it. This isn't about passing the torch, it's about relighting it.
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General Paul Nakasone
This is exciting for me and I would tell you that it's been a decision that I've been really, really happy I made. There is just something about being around young people that have just incredible ideas. I was always fascinated by my engagements with young people, particularly in a military setting where there was absolutely no, well, little concern about talking to the four Star and being able to give ideas and being. I found that refreshing. And then coming back to, you know, a university setting after so many years being away, it's the same way.
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Dina Temple Rast
But he didn't just want to research problems, he said he wanted to solve them. So he created something called the Wicked Problems Lab.
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General Paul Nakasone
We said, hey, at the Institute of National Security, let's have this lab that takes up really hard problems. Pragmatically, I don't want something that's going to solve something 10 or 20 years down the road. We've got a problem now. So let's get ideas that come into the Wicked Problems Lab and let's start to test them.
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Dina Temple Rast
And one of the first problems they tackled how to build bridges between independent white hat hackers who might find vulnerabilities on their own, and the government who can tell people about them.
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General Paul Nakasone
How do we connect, you know, white hat hackers that have this information that might want to share it with the government, but don't want to be known and want to be able to do it securely. So we developed a means of communication that could be used that, you know, we identify the ideas of who in the government might be able to do this, might be able to share the information. But again, it's a radical approach to, I think, a problem that's really difficult for the nation that needs to be addressed.
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Dina Temple Rast
So instead of a bug bounty program, this would be a slightly different operation.
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General Paul Nakasone
Right. So consider it perhaps, you know, bug bounty with a persistent piece of what's going on.
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Dina Temple Rast
Persistent, It's a word associated with the general in cyber circles. He had championed persistent engagement against adversaries when he was at the nsa. He basically told operators at the NSA in Cybercom, we're done playing just defense. And he wants to apply that same strategy to inviting white hat hackers to help address some huge problems like ransomware.
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General Paul Nakasone
Wouldn't it be nice to have the keys to a ransomware that has just been inflicted on a victim? Or wouldn't it be nice to understand that, oh, there's Medusa, that malware that we know that's getting ready to be launched against Hospital X or City Y, wouldn't it be nice to be able to give them that information before that happens? That's the type of work I think that we've got to think more of. And we've got plenty of challenges out there. What we need to do is bring this Venn diagram together and say, okay, let's solve this together.
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Dina Temple Rast
And do you think there are a lot of white hat hackers out there who see this before we do?
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General Paul Nakasone
Last summer I delivered the keynote address at DEFCON in Vegas in front of 5,000 of my closest friends. Hi, I'm Paul. I want to thank Dark Tangent for inviting me to DEFCON 32. More importantly, I want to thank okay, we don't exactly look alike, perhaps, and we have different backgrounds, hackers that have been invited not only in the private sector, but also for our hackers that work in government. And it's so good to see so many of you today. They share the commonality of we want a safe and secure process upon which we can operate in cyberspace. This is the type of radical partnership that I should have realized six years ago when I started at nsa. And I think that that's an important piece of what needs to be thought about as we go forward.
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Dina Temple Rast
When we come back, the Summit on Modern Conflicts and Emerging Threats at Vanderbilt. Stay with.
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General Paul Nakasone
Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host.
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Dina Temple Rast
Of Close All Tabs from kqed where every week we reveal how the online.
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General Paul Nakasone
World collides with everyday life.
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Dina Temple Rast
You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it.
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General Paul Nakasone
So my first reaction was, haha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real?
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Dina Temple Rast
And I think we will see a twitch streamer president maybe within our lifetimes.
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General Paul Nakasone
Close All Tabs wherever you listen to.
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Dina Temple Rast
Podcasts from recorded future news, this is Click Here. Let me take you back to the Wicked Problems Lab for a second. Do you have a pet problem that you would love to solve?
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General Paul Nakasone
I want to get after ransomware.
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Dina Temple Rast
For more and more people. Ransomware is personal now. It's no longer something that happens to someone else far away. It's everywhere. Inside Hollywood Presbyterian Medical center, computer screens.
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General Paul Nakasone
Have been dark since hackers took over the data network hack on a critical health care system causing havoc nationwide and.
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Dina Temple Rast
In Nevada and for rural hospitals, it's existential.
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General Paul Nakasone
They service about 16% of the United States today. That's well over, you know, 114 million people, I think. And as we think about that, when a rural hospital is hit by a ransomware attack, it's debilitating. They have very, very thin margins. They don't have a tremendous amount of cybersecurity expertise and they're at the mercy many times of having to pay these ransoms. I want to get after that, I want to make it so hard for these actors to operate that we start drawing up the funds much in the same way that we got after terrorism after 9, 11. I think it's the same idea.
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Dina Temple Rast
But this isn't 2001. Now the battlefield is digital and the enemy is decentralized and more nimble and pretty ruthless. So you'd like CISA to maybe focus a little bit on rural hospitals. Would that be a perfect scenario?
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General Paul Nakasone
So perfect, perfect scenario for me is let's bring the private sector, that includes individuals and businesses together with governments, together with academia and let's get some ideas here in terms of how we go after this. We've had surges, we've had a number of different elements that have been run by different policymakers that have had some impacts. But we need a broader impact and we need really a strategy that goes after this for a while.
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Dina Temple Rast
Well, there's a fundamental problem with hospitals anyway, right. Is that they have such a broad attack surface. So you have an MRI who might be running on, you know, Windows 98. It's a machine that lasts for 20 years as opposed to your computer that maybe you replace every two or three. So there's sort of a fundamental infrastructure problem when it comes to hospitals. Right?
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General Paul Nakasone
Correct. And I think that, you know, we've got to think about. So how do we do compliance in the future and how do we allow these systems in a manner that, that can be updated with the latest patches to be done as opposed to, you know, putting it off and saying it's too difficult because, you know, we have regulations that cover this, that no longer are they going to be certified. We live in a different world today. And I think the dangers that cybersecurity have shown us have to be solved.
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Dina Temple Rast
And the strategy is beginning to take shape. On April 10th and 11th, Vanderbilt will host the Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. So let's talk a little bit about your Summit on Modern Conflict. What are the themes that you're trying to tease out from it?
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General Paul Nakasone
Well, AI and national security, its threats, challenges and opportunities. Two day summit. This is the fourth year that we've run it. It's Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. What's new about this one? Well, first of all, what's new about it is the fact that demand has been sky high.
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Dina Temple Rast
700 RSVPs, a 450 seat auditorium OpenAI's Sam Altman will be there. So we'll top brass and white hat hackers and students and analysts.
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General Paul Nakasone
We're going to have five different panels that cover everything from AI's broad impact on the nation to biopharma, to looking at the changing nature of conflict to how does AI impact the Indo Pacific region. And then finally, perhaps my favorite Vanguard predictions for 25. So a panel of experts that say, hey, this is what we should anticipate for 2025. The neat thing, Dean. And when you come back to summit in 2026, we're going to go ahead and show what they predicted. So we're going to try our hand.
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Dina Temple Rast
At that because he says he didn't remember too many people saying, hey, Assad is going to fall in Syria, or that Russia would invade Ukraine, or that there would be two attacks on Israel followed by massive attacks on Iran, among other things. Likely to be discussed as well is what happens when AI becomes not just a spectator to war, but a combatant in it.
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General Paul Nakasone
One of the things that we've learned in Russia, Ukraine is the idea that electronic warfare still has an impact on drones and other type of capabilities in terms of their navigation systems, their targeting systems. And one of the things that has been proposed is wouldn't it be interesting if we had this type of capability that would be able to make decisions on its own when it was being jammed, it could turn left or could turn right. It could discern a target. It wouldn't need necessarily a communications capability or a tethering back to a human. This is the challenge that we're operating in right now. As we look at our adversaries, they have no problems with that absence of a human in the loop. That is something that goes against all of our policies in the Department of Defense. There is always a human in the loop for critical and lethal targeting. I think that as we move on in the future, we're going to have to figure out what is the level of comfort we're going to have with the ability of these generative capabilities to make decisions. Is it okay to make a decision on a lethal run? Perhaps not. Is it okay for it to make a decision within a network as we're trying to look for a vulnerability or patch of vulnerability? Do we always have to go back to have a human in the loop there? Again, I think that our adversaries are going to push us to areas that we're going to have to make very key decisions on.
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Dina Temple Rast
And do you think that'll come up at the summit?
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General Paul Nakasone
I think that there will be a discussion as we talk about the future of conflict, of what's going to occur here, you know, as we think about the policy implications for artificial intelligence. They're vast.
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Dina Temple Rast
And the measure of success.
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General Paul Nakasone
I think I'll know when successful when I hear the reactions in Vanderbilt University of the students that are there. Does this excite them? Is this something that they're interested in? Is this something that really drives, you know, their ideas about future service From.
- [16:15]
Dina Temple Rast
Recorded Future News this has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Temple. Rest it was edited by Karen Duffin. We'll be back on Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.
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C
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