← The Rest Is Classified
The Rest Is Classified
113. How To Protect Your Secrets: Is The Toaster Spying On You? (Ep 2)
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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com this episode is sponsored by HP.
- [00:20]
Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [01:32]
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- [02:38]
Gordon Carrera
Technology is making many aspects of spycraft harder than ever. In an era of smart cities with video cameras on every street and facial recognition technology increasingly ubiquitous, spying has become much harder for a CIA officer working overseas in a hostile country, meeting sources who are risking their own safety to offer valuable information. Constant surveillance poses them an acute threat. Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [03:08]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey.
- [03:09]
Gordon Carrera
And that was former CIA Director Bill Burns, I think. A friend of the pod, isn't he?
- [03:14]
David McCloskey
Friend of the pod? Friend of the pod, absolutely.
- [03:17]
Gordon Carrera
Writing in Foreign Affairs a couple of years back about what we're talking about in this two parter on the second part now, which is about how technology is changing the human espionage business. Last time we kind of set up these ideas of ubiquitous technical surveillance, the ability of sensors and data to track people wherever they were, and just making really spying much harder. And this time we're going to continue that story. And we do have a special guest to continue taking us through this subject, don't we, David?
- [03:50]
David McCloskey
That's right. After our first episode, we convinced Glenn to stay. We are very lucky to have with us again Glenn Chaffetz, who is a former CIA officer, three time chief of station, who was also the agency's first chief of tradecraft and operational technology. So Glenn, thanks for being back with us into this journey into technology and human espionage.
- [04:11]
Glenn Chaffetz
Glad to be here, David.
- [04:12]
Gordon Carrera
Glenn, last time I guess we left off discussing the kind of, some of the challenges of clandestinity, which is basically how you operate and how much harder it's got in this world. And we're looking at some of the kind of key topics and the elements of the intelligence business. And I guess one of them is how you communicate because that's a key fact. You know, we talked before about how you might find someone and then the challenges in going to meet them, which have got harder. But then it's how you, once you've maybe met them and started a relationship with someone, how you communicate with them without being spotted.
- [04:49]
David McCloskey
We've done some, I guess, fun historical stories that have featured unique kind of ways of communicating clandestinely between intelligence officer and asset. I mean, I guess, Gordon, the one that comes to mind immediately is we did that series earlier this year on Adolf Tolkachev, a spy for the agency operating in Moscow during the Cold War. And in that case we sort of had everything from Tolkachev wandering up to the then chief of station in Moscow and like leaving a note on the door, dropping a letter inside, you know, his sort of open car window to after he was recruited, using these kind of impersonal signal sites or even short range agent communications, these kind of burst devices that communicate between a device that Tolkachev has and a device that the case officer has. So we had this kind of historical cases of it.
- [05:47]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I thought you were going to mention pigeons, though, David, I thought, well, you know, if you go back to World War II, the use of pigeons for communication and clandestine use the pigeons for communication. I won't dwell on pigeons anymore. But World War II pigeons, big radio.
- [05:59]
David McCloskey
Don't you, Gordon, though, won't you. Don't make promises that you can't.
- [06:02]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, sorry. Glenn is. We. Glenn is probably very confused by my references to pigeons.
- [06:07]
David McCloskey
We need to start a tracker maybe, and some. One of our secret squirrels will start a tracker. Of the episodes in which Gordon mentions pigeons. Because. Because I would.
- [06:17]
Gordon Carrera
Wait, maybe the ones I don't. Maybe the ones I don't. Maybe the ones you don't.
- [06:20]
David McCloskey
Yeah, to make it easier on the. On the person keeping. Keeping tabs. No, you're right. Pigeons.
- [06:26]
Gordon Carrera
Radios, Covert communications radios. Pigeons. And then you get to burst transmitters, and I guess, you know, you're right, you go from kind of, yes, pigeons, but also big radio sets to kind of small radio sets to, you know, burst transmitters. I mean, famously, the Brits got caught in the early 2000s using a spy rock. I always love this in Moscow. And they had a. According to the Russians, never denied by the Brits. And I think we know it's pretty true. But the Russians said that there was a kind of fake rock which had a receiver in it, and then someone would walk past the rock, press a button, and their transmitter would kind of beam the information into the rock, which then could be extracted from the rock at a later date, which gives you some idea of the kind of technology that's involved in covert communications when you're trying to keep the communication secret. So I guess that's the challenge.
- [07:17]
David McCloskey
The Brits, Gordon, are very creative in this field, I think, because if you remember back to the series we did on Mansfield, coming the first of the Secret Intelligence Service, you had some crazy people cooking up the idea of using semen for secret writing. Right.
- [07:33]
Gordon Carrera
So the Brits Very, very much creative.
- [07:36]
David McCloskey
How I refer to it, male bodily fluid is.
- [07:39]
Gordon Carrera
Is the correct term.
- [07:41]
David McCloskey
Male bodily fluid is a worse term than the actual term which I use, but I don't. Maybe we'll have to bleep out, yes.
- [07:48]
Gordon Carrera
That was invisible ink. Invisible ink. We should say yes. We should say, yes, that was to use for invisible ink, which I guess was another method of clandestine communication. These were some of the ways people used in the past. But I guess what we're heading to now is the fact, you know, most communication is digital. But by definition, Glenn, I guess, you know, this is maybe where you want to come in. Digital Tends to leave a trail, doesn't it? Digital, you know, the Internet, all these things have problems, don't they, when it comes to communication?
- [08:15]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah, I can't, I can't talk about how asset handlers communicate with assets. I can say that communication is always a challenge. You know, if you look back in history, humans are infinitely creative about how they convey information to other humans, as you just demonstrated in a way that I'd rather not rehash. But you know, the problem with digital communication is again, that people have to think about what other people can see or hear or acquire and when. And again, they conflate aspects of that problem. So if you look at things that have been in the news, people famously said, okay, well signal is secure or iMessage or WhatsApp, any of these end to end encrypted commercial messaging apps are secure. Well, the content is secure. So if Gordon and David, you communicate via signal, with some exceptions, no one's going to know what the content of that communication is. And we could talk about that, those exceptions, but they're going to know that you're communicating. And that's just as bad and dangerous for maintaining a clandestine relationship as knowing the content. If David has secrets for one country and Gordon, you're from another country and you're talking to David, that's going to look bad and that's going to pique the interest of David's country. So you have the content of the communication, you have the fact of the communication, and then you have the signature of the communication method. So for example, if you're in North Korea and you have an iPhone with signal on it, that's going to look odd, right? So you have to make sure that all of those things match. And you know, you have direct communication, you have indirect communication, you have simultaneous communication, you have communication that's delayed. And so I think the challenge in the digital age is for those who are communicating to work it out so that they hide the fact that of the communication and the signature of the communication as well as its content. And again, it's a, it's a tremendous challenge and I think there's very smart people in various agencies who know how to do this. I won't go into detail about the different ways that they can do it, but, but they, they manage to do it.
- [10:41]
David McCloskey
If I thought about, let's take the, the example you gave of Gordon and I communicating on Signal or WhatsApp. I mean, if you had money to go buy the data, how would you establish that connection? Put aside for the the sort of content, but just Gordon and I being in contact on signal.
- [10:58]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah.
- [10:59]
David McCloskey
How do you committed spy hunter slash. Just maybe like data broker. How do you get that? Where does that information come from? How do I get it so that I could do something with it?
- [11:09]
Glenn Chaffetz
Well, I mean, this is, this is. Every single tech company and data broker in the world does this, which is your device is sending messages and Gordon's device is receiving those messages. And even without any of the content, they go through infrastructure, they go onto servers. You can work out the timing if you're talking. You can infer the timing if you're texting. Right. A lot of the texting is. Is done simultaneously. If you've ever watched kids texting, and I'm sure you do the same thing, you text, I text. It's not that hard. Right. These two devices are in contact with each other. These two people know each other. That's part of the business model for the digital advertising environment. How do you establish someone's network? I could establish your network, David. I just buy the data about who you text, who you email. All those devices leave traces on the infrastructure. You buy that data, you. You run it through an algorithm. Here's David's network. You overlay that with travel. You overlay that with social media mentions. It's not that hard.
- [12:19]
Gordon Carrera
No. I always think it's interesting. You made a good point there. It's not always even about the content of the call, because I think people have a lot of ideas about encryption. And a lot of the tech companies will say, well, your communications are safe because they're end to end encrypted. I always think two points. One is your point, which is, especially if you're worried about the sensitivity of your call communications, the content is encrypted, but the metadata, the data about the conversation, often is traveling on a normal telecoms network. And if you're a security service with access to the telecoms network, you can get that data and you can do all kinds of very clever, you know, kind of network analysis of going, this phone's talking to that phone, but it's only talking to that phone and it talks to it once. Or, you know, you can do all that kind of stuff. And I guess the other point people make is it's, yeah, it's end to end, encrypted at the two ends. It's gotta be unencrypted and open because otherwise you can't read a message. You know, it's no good. So if you have access to the device itself, you get access to that and you can open it, you know, whether through a thumbprint or knowing the passcode. Then again, you're kind of into the actual content of the message and all the devices. So I sometimes think people in the, you know, who worry about security and often, you know, because I kind of deal with it a lot as a journalist, you know, where sources are worried about it and you've got to kind of be honest with people. It is hard if you're a journalist dealing with sources, if you're going to deal with them electronically, even over signal or other messages, to kind of guarantee that there is no way of connecting the two of you or of ever knowing the kind of content of your, of your communication. It's very hard to guarantee, I think.
- [13:52]
Glenn Chaffetz
Well, precisely. So you raised two issues. So let's look at end to end encryption. There's the famous case of Pegasus and Jeff Bezos's phone. Pegasus and similar malware.
- [14:04]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. We should explain what Pegasus is.
- [14:06]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a mouth, it's a malware that transmits what's on the phone to the cyber intruder. And when you open up your imessage or signal message or, or WhatsApp message, whatever it is, and you're reading it on the phone, that's what Pegasus is reading. As you said, it's no longer encrypted. Great. It was end to end encrypted, but now it's reading it at the end. So it hasn't decrypted, it hasn't broken the encryption, it's reading it in the clear the same way that, that you are. And then the issue that you raised of, of the metadata is, is, is a really great point. Okay, so there's a lot of investigations that involve say for example, insider trading or is someone gambling? They investigate. Okay, is this person gambling and he or she has inside knowledge of injuries or what have you? No, no, I've never gambled. And then all of your calls go to a bookie or two or to a legitimate gambling site. Well, you just said you're not gambling. And I don't have to have the content of the call to start the investigation. Right, or even to draw conclusions. I just have to know that you're in contact. There's a lot of investigations, for example, on insider trading and inappropriate sharing of information on, for, for financial firms. They're supposed to use dedicated phones that are recorded to make sure everything's on the up and up. A lot of them will use cell phones to get around that of course, that leaves a record and it doesn't matter whether the content of the call is hidden. A, you shouldn't be on that phone. So now we have the signature issue. Yeah, right. You can't be doing business work on that phone. And B, you've now established through metadata a connection with someone you should not be connected with. Right. So I don't need as an investigator that content. I already know with near certainty that you've done something wrong. And the rest of it is just tying it up neatly.
- [16:10]
Gordon Carrera
I think the Pegasus point is fascinating because that is developed by commercial companies and then sold to lots of states.
- [16:18]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yes.
- [16:18]
Gordon Carrera
You know, and, and states technically for law enforcement, counterterrorism. But we know it's been used, you know, by lots of governments around the world for spying on political opponents, spying on journalists.
- [16:28]
Glenn Chaffetz
So I think, I think the Saudis use this against Kashoggi.
- [16:32]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, exactly.
- [16:33]
Glenn Chaffetz
To catch and murder him. So.
- [16:35]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah. And that's a perfect example where, you know, something which had been quite a high end technique, I guess, you know, in the past, you'd have thought the ability to kind of break into someone's phone and capture everything that's happening on it. You'd have said, you know, that is something that only gchq, nsa, maybe Israelis and a few could do. And now something, it's something which is commercially made available to a much larger group of governments. So you see the kind of proliferation of spying technology which can be used to kind of surveil people. I think it's a really big shift, isn't it?
- [17:07]
Glenn Chaffetz
Well, this is what I was talking with David about before, which is that intelligence is a profession and an activity has jumped the tracks. And it was, and it was during this period that we talked about where all of this data became available and that it was able to be analyzed. And so you look at China, for example, which has turned its whole country into an intelligent state not just to surveil and oppress its own population, but to steal economic information from the United States and Great Britain and Japan and South Korea and Australia and all the rest. And really it's turned intelligence into a mass activity where both the actors, the intelligence collectors are no longer full time professionals, they are business people, they are proxies for the government, or they turn the government into proxies for their businesses. And the objects of that intelligence are not state actors and government officials. They are companies like Apple and Google and GM and, and Goldman Sachs and anybody else who has, as we talked about at the beginning of the first show who has information of value. And so what China has done has really taken this technology and expanded intelligence and attacks on its adversaries into the private sector. So it's a version of the old fashioned Francis James Drake stealing Spanish gold, except on steroids. To use a cliche. David's going to be mad at me as a professional novelist.
- [18:49]
David McCloskey
We'll edit that out.
- [18:51]
Glenn Chaffetz
We'll edit out the cliche. Don't be trite, Glenn. But it's taken that and turbocharged and energized it and turned it into a mass activity. And so you look at, say, the 2017 intelligence law in Church China, Article 7, which says that every individual and every company in China must, must cooperate with China's intelligence services. And that goes both ways. So these companies go to the intelligence services and say, hey, we would like to get this information. And what you do is instead of use this for a purely national security purpose, you use it for a business purpose to literally put rival companies in the United States and abroad out of business. This is the technology revolution plus the intelligence revolution. One of our old colleagues, Anthony Vinci, calls the fourth intelligence revolution, together with Neo mercantilism. And that's the world that we're in right now, and that's the business that I'm in right now is helping companies figure out how to defend their valuable information against companies and countries that work together to do what you just referred to, Gordon, which is steal all kinds of information using all of them. Means available.
- [20:07]
David McCloskey
I want to make sure we come back to this because I want to park this idea, because I think there's a bigger question kind of rolled up in all of this, which is does the Western intelligence model still work and how will it be able to compete with the Chinese model? But maybe we could come back to that because I wanted to, I wanted to ask again, on the communication side. We talked about the idea that Gordon and I are talking. Okay, that's probably enough for an investigator to start, to start to make investigation. Right. If they just see two people that shouldn't be in communication. But Glenn, you know, I want to ask about quantum computing here and whether we should expect that in the future we'll even have encryption. So in other words, like, how much of a. What's the, what's the prospect that, you know, five, ten years down the, down the road there actually won't be any privacy even in the content of the communication.
- [21:03]
Glenn Chaffetz
Wow. A great question. Yeah. So. So quantum decrypts in, in seconds or minutes or hours, that which under Traditional encryption would take centuries to decrypt. And that's horrifying because our adversaries have already hoovered up untold quantities of encrypted information as they can and as we could. I mean, it's there for the taking out of the air and over the wires, but it's pretty useless right now because it's encrypted. But when you have quantum decryption, it's not useless. And all of that information at rest and all of that information in transit now is no longer secret. And that's horrifying. And the way to protect that information going forward is to use quantum encryption, which everybody is aware of, but they're not doing, not in a large scale. And the problem is we're not going to know that anybody has quantum decryption until it already exists. I mean, think about this. If you could decrypt everything that's encrypted, would you tell anybody about it? Hey, I'm all of a sudden able to read your mail and read your messages. You wouldn't. Right? And we're not going to know if another, if an adversary has that until after we're already sunk.
- [22:24]
Gordon Carrera
I mean, the parallel to me is always a bit like Bletchley park, when Bletchley park could break codes. You keep it quiet and you keep selling the people the idea that their messages are completely unbreakable. You know, Crypto AG did this for decades. The Brits came, kept the Bletchley secret for decades because they could still read loads of information and gain loads of intelligence because everyone went, oh, my communications are perfectly secure on these devices. And so the reality might be, who knows, you know, somewhere in China right now there's a quantum computer, you know, which is cracking all, all the messages and which is a game changer for intelligence because suddenly you then have this kind of radical transparency in which anything which isn't built with a new standard of kind of quantum, quantum resistant encryption is going to be transparent. You know, a whole layer of secrecy and secrets and private information suddenly disappears. I mean, that is. That's a kind of potential game changer, isn't it, in the sec?
- [23:17]
Glenn Chaffetz
Oh, it's a nightmare, Gordon. I mean, think about all the information that's already sitting in storage in data lakes that's encrypted, and then the capability to decrypt that everybody's got. Think about the financial system, which depends on standard encryption. What's going to happen then?
- [23:33]
David McCloskey
I don't want to think about that, Glenn. That's terrifying.
- [23:36]
Glenn Chaffetz
I would like you to think about, David, perhaps that's your next novel.
- [23:38]
Gordon Carrera
All your financial information, David, all transparent to the world. Imagine all your secrets, David, if you.
- [23:45]
David McCloskey
Put on your MSS hat, Glenn, which maybe you have behind you on the table there.
- [23:50]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah.
- [23:51]
David McCloskey
If you have that capability, what do you do with it?
- [23:54]
Glenn Chaffetz
Whatever you want, David. Whatever you want. The sky is the limit. I mean, imagine again, we're doing a hypothetical here, but imagine China has hoovered up some quantity of encrypted information that goes over the wires and over the air about the US Military, about the US Government, about the US Intelligence establishment, and it's all encrypted. And then one day, because they've succeeded in decryption, they can read all of that mail, they can read all of that messages, think about all of the things that they know. Think all the things that, that the United States government wants to keep secret from China. And then you, you expand that beyond government to, okay, this is everything that Apple does and, and Google and Amazon and Anthropic and Microsoft and Goldman Sachs. I, I, I mean, it's just horrifying. The short answer is whatever they want. And so our, our secrets aren't safe. Our, our military planning isn't safe. Our intelligence operations aren't safe. Our money isn't safe. Money, credit, that's all based on trust. That's all based on the idea that these ones and zeros that are in computers are safe from theft. And now it's, it's attacked now and again in a cyber way. The North Koreans have a nice little industry in attacking banks and crypto, but that's going to look like child's play. That's going to look like a tiny iota a sty compared to the absolute forest of secrets that are going to be revealed when Quantum comes online.
- [25:36]
David McCloskey
Is it a certainty that it is coming? Is it just a matter of when? Is it like maybe it's five years, maybe it's 10? Or like, is it, the joke is.
- [25:44]
Gordon Carrera
It'S always five years away. Quantum computer, it's always five years away. The breakthrough. But I mean, I was talking to someone yesterday who said might be really only five years away now that might actually be true?
- [25:54]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah, I don't know. But I wouldn't take the risk, David, that it's not right, that we continue to make progress. It's not as if human beings are not making progress on quantum decryption. They are. I can't tell you whether it already happened. I can't tell you. Which is another thing that would keep me up at night. Or if it's a day away or 10 years, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows.
- [26:18]
Gordon Carrera
That might be a good place to take a quick break on that moment of slight doom and gloom. And we'll come back after the break and see even more doom. No, no, no, no. We'll tell everyone everything is fine. But how we should think about this, this world of technology. One last look at it with Glenn and we'll see you after the break.
- [26:41]
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To get the best discount off your NORDVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com restisclassified Our link will also give you four extra bunts on the two year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the episode description box. Welcome back. I think Gordon and Glenn have been talking for most of this kind of two part series to this stage about how tech is changing the world of espionage and in particular human espionage. We've been trying to do it from the lens of, I think some key elements in the trade of human espionage. I thought we might switch for a second and actually talk about some specific pieces of technology because there are some that I think the impact that they have spreads across the entire field of the intelligence business and it'd be good to talk about them individually. I mean, I guess one that pops immediately into my mind that I think we really haven't talked much about yet is how cheaper smaller drones or UAVs are impacting espionage today. Because obviously, I mean, you know, we had the world of sort of armed drones that we see all around us in Ukraine. But I'm kind of thinking here, Glenn, of how maybe more from a just surveillance standpoint, the proliferation of really effective, high quality drones that I can buy for my son that cost about 30 bucks. You know, how does that whole landscape impact this kind of the business of human espionage today?
- [31:35]
Glenn Chaffetz
It's developed by leaps and bounds over the last few years and I think we'll continue to see improvements in capability and reductions in price as technology goes in the next few Years. So obviously it is a sensor platform and it is cheap and it is capable and it's controllable. And that represents a danger, I think, both for state actors and for non state actors. There was a story, I think, a few months ago in the New York Times about a drone loitering outside the window of Ericsson in Copenhagen. You know the story I'm talking about, David, where it's.
- [32:22]
David McCloskey
No, no, it's photographs, laughing, thinking about a drone sitting outside a window, just, just watching.
- [32:28]
Glenn Chaffetz
I mean, think about, think about this, right? You know, access to somebody's computer screen or keyboard is gold, right? If I could photograph you typing away, I could learn a lot about what you're doing. If you think you're safe because you're on the 40th floor of a building or the 14th floor of a building, and I just park a very quiet, very small drone outside that window and photograph the whole thing. I have all kinds of information that's useful. So that's a nifty little collection tool which is partly human because you have the operator. But I can imagine scenarios in which the human is further and further away from, from the actual collection and then it's stored and it's beamed, sometimes in real time and then used. So that's, that's, you know, an exceptionally valuable tool to have. We've already seen how valuable they are in the battlefield, but I would be worried about how valuable they are in terms of business intelligence. A lot of companies have very good access controls. And I'm not talking about companies in defense. I'm just talking about companies that might be targets of other companies abroad, principally from China, where that information confers tremendous advantage. Getting back to our definition of intelligence, but they don't have any counter drone program. You know, they don't operate in skiffs. They have windows for their people. They don't want their people to be like we had to be back in the day, and these windowless offices, deep inside buildings without windows. And so the possibilities really go from there. Add microphones to the cameras and. And you're really in business. WI fi detectors, all kinds of sensors, sensors, microphones.
- [34:15]
Gordon Carrera
Cameras are now in cars, they are in, you know, watches, they're in phone. You know, we used to think of it as, just as phones, as the tracking devices or the sensor devices, but the extent to which everyday items are effectively connected to the Internet. Internet of things. Exactly. You know, your fridge, your fridge speaks to the Internet.
- [34:35]
Glenn Chaffetz
Right.
- [34:35]
Gordon Carrera
You know, and it's. The point is convenience to tell you, have you Run out of milk and I can order it for you. But it also may be able to tell someone who could easily hack into it because I bet it's cyber security isn't very good. Is this person at home at the moment? Have they not opened the fridge for two days? In other words, is that a good time to break in? Or are they stocking up extra bottles of vodka in their freezer, which maybe is a sign of alcoholism? Well, some other, some other indicator. So you know, it's that kind of everyday pervasiveness of this, which I just think is. It's really game changing, isn't it?
- [35:06]
Glenn Chaffetz
Well, everything you buy. I have a real ambivalence about these loyalty programs. Right. The point of the loyalty program is not to, it's to charge people who don't share information. More money is the point of the loyalty program. Right. So, so you go to the store, right? And like, oh, you're buying your buy. This is, this was obviously many years ago. I'm buying a newspaper. Can I have your phone number? No, you can have my money and then you give me the newspaper. What do I have to give you my phone number for? So that you know that I bought the Wall Street Journal on Friday. That's not, you know, why do I want a network scale? Good God, no, I don't. You know, and then your credit card bill tells you, tells people masses of information about you. And, and of course after Covid, no one uses cash anymore. The wonderful thing about cash is it divorced your identity from your behavior. But try spending cash in a lot of places and you can't or they discourage you.
- [35:59]
Gordon Carrera
And so definitely China, right?
- [36:01]
Glenn Chaffetz
No, you can't.
- [36:02]
Gordon Carrera
I mean, but cryptocurrency, I mean cryptocurrency offers some.
- [36:05]
Glenn Chaffetz
No, no, it's some benefits to people. Now you spend the time, you can track it. It's, you know, they have tumblers and, and, but, but eventually given enough effort, you're not going to be able to hide. So yeah, I mean, blockchain offers some advantages and it really discourages investigators because it's a lot of work. But I mean, you know, and Tor, same thing. But all of those things can eventually be unwound. It's the time and effort of the investigator.
- [36:35]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's interesting, I mean just you mentioned Tor, which is the onion rooter kind of dark web. I think we started the first episode with a quote from the chief of MI6, the last chief of MI6, Richard Moore. And in that same speech he also launched, I think something called Silent courier, which was a kind of portal, a platform for people to contact MI6 on the dark web. And on the one hand that's a kind of example maybe where technology is an enabler for a spy service because you've got the equivalent of walk ins people who want to offer themselves up to a spy service. I think of Metrokin just because I've written a book on him, you know, who walks into the, you know, the American and then the British embassies in the Baltics in 1992. In those days you had to walk into an embassy to contact them. Now you can try and use one of these dark web platforms. They promise a degree of anonymity to contact MI6. And I think CIA runs a kind of similar thing, you know, quite open, openly saying to Russians, particularly if you're aggrieved with your government, you know, use this platform to approach us. So I guess, you know, that is an example where some of that technology is an enabler. But I guess it also creates a single point of failure and some risks as well. But you've got a lot of pressure on that one platform and that one point of contact.
- [37:46]
Glenn Chaffetz
Well, Gordon, I don't want to talk about that one.
- [37:49]
Gordon Carrera
That's okay.
- [37:50]
Glenn Chaffetz
That's not what I want to comment on.
- [37:52]
Gordon Carrera
No, that's fine. But I'll comment on it. And I think it's really interesting because I think it is an example where technology, it's the fact it's enabling and a risk. And I think that's the kind of interesting thing about technology, isn't it? Is that, you know, there's two sides of the coin for lots of this.
- [38:07]
David McCloskey
Going back to the Internet of Things point, I was having a conversation, I don't know, it's a couple weeks ago with a cybersecurity expert. I was actually doing book research and he was telling me a story about the proliferation of cases he's seeing of people who have their WI fi hacked by someone going in through a pretty un, like a device like a washing machine or a refrigerator or your connected scale that does not have the same level of defense as the traditional router, but is still connected to it all the same. Because you just sort of don't think about it like, well, am I doing software updates on the washing machine?
- [38:47]
Glenn Chaffetz
Right?
- [38:47]
David McCloskey
No, and it's the weekly link. But you don't, you just almost don't even think about it now. It's, yeah, it's totally normal to have a washing machine that's connected to my WI fi. Why not?
- [38:58]
Glenn Chaffetz
Your toaster is spying on you. That could be the title of your next book. It's horrifying.
- [39:04]
David McCloskey
One topic we've talked about in little bits and pieces throughout these. This conversation has been artificial intelligence. And this is a huge question. And obviously, you know, the impact of AI on the intelligence business is. It's not just impacting human, it's impacting analysis and everything. Right. But I'm curious, from your standpoint, Glenn, I mean, how should we think about the way that AI is disrupting the human intelligence game to the degree that.
- [39:37]
Glenn Chaffetz
It speeds up collection, analysis, interpretation, it represents, I think, an offensive weapon in terms of collection, a potential tool for counterintelligence and a potential tool for analysis. What do all of these features mean? And how quickly can we make these associations that we wouldn't do if we didn't automate them? So I don't think everybody understands yet all of the implications for AI and machine learning. The one that I. That I've probably paid attention to the most is the collection of faces. And the analysis of faces and how it is has made that a lot better. It can also be used for spoofing voices and spoofing video. So we've had a number of cases where we look at companies and they're vetting people and they're doing these interviews, like this one, over a video channel, and the person is not the person they're purporting to be because they've used AI tools to disguise what their face looks like and what their voice looks like. And now right now, that's fairly crude, and there's some very easy ways of determining that, but that's going to get harder and harder as time goes on. You talked about identity earlier, Gordon, really, face to face. But you also have identity over the phone, and you have identity over video chats and. And I think that's easier to disguise. And people have to determine fakes. And then you have to look at influence operations, what's real and intelligence services malign. Intelligence services could flood the zone with fakes. Now, it doesn't matter that it's determined to be a fake, necessarily from their perspective, in the sense that nobody then believes anything. You have the inability to separate facts from fiction.
- [41:32]
Gordon Carrera
Am I really speaking to David or not? Yeah, that definitely scares me. But I. I mean, I guess as we kind of, you know, start to round things up, I mean, this world of deep fakes, of AI, of not being sure who's who, human intelligence, the point of it, as opposed to kind of cyber or digital Intelligence is that there is a human relationship, I guess, yes. And at some point it requires two people in a room or probably to be physically together and to talk to each other and have a relationship and look into each other's eyes, not in a romantic way, but in a kind of intelligence way and say, do I trust you? You know, do you know that is the kind of core of the business. Does it survive?
- [42:08]
Glenn Chaffetz
Do we think it certainly shrinks. I think the opportunities for doing that have shrunk. I think the opportunities for humit have shrunk in part because you can achieve so much now with data, with collecting commercially available and openly available information and parsing that together. And that makes the analyst the targeter, a much more important piece, the OSINT investigator a much more important piece of intelligence collection and analysis. But there's still a role for humans. None of that data can tell me what a foreign adversary leader, call it Xi, call it Putin, whomever, no one can tell me what he perceives at a particular time, what he plans, what he intends to, that can only be gleaned from someone in the inner circle. And then getting in touch with that person in the inner circle and determining whether that person is willing to share and then arranging the transfer of that information is much more difficult now. And I think the opportunities to have long conversations where you build that relationship have diminished because we are trying to have those conversations in a sea of sensors and data. And that's just hard.
- [43:25]
David McCloskey
I remember reading an article, I think a couple years back, and I know we won't comment on it, but just, I'll put it out there. There was a Washington Post article that was quoting somebody from the agency as saying, hey, the number of recruitments is down over the last four or five years. We're recruiting fewer human sources than we used to, to. And it seems like I'd always sort of conceptually thought, oh, it's a, is a supply side problem in that it's just harder to do it because of all these tech challenges. So we're trying, but we're not having as much success or it's just in certain cases it's impossible. But I guess I'm hearing you say it's also kind of a demand side problem in that a lot of the questions that we would have had in the past where we would have tasked human collection, we don't need to anymore. So in some ways, if HUMINT is kind of the market share is shrinking, it's not necessarily just because it's harder. It's because there Might actually be less demand to actually put some of these questions to humans than we, we had in the past. The exception being the plants and intentions point that you're raising, which is what is she thinking? What is Putin thinking?
- [44:37]
Glenn Chaffetz
Right.
- [44:37]
David McCloskey
Those are evergreen questions where you actually really want a well placed human to give you that perspective.
- [44:44]
Glenn Chaffetz
I would just go back to the scenario where you have a leader you want to know something about, right? That that leader scale is networked. His toaster is spying on him, he's got social media. He drives in a car made after 2003 or is driven in a car made after 2003, which means that it produces a digital exhaust which can be tracked. The leader speaks on a cell phone, the leader's photographed, the leader's roundly quoted. There's all sorts of information about that leader, both intentionally and unintentionally produced that tech companies derive great insights from, great analysis from, and governments could do the same. And so what we had to collect via humint about that person, about any person, has logically shrunk because you can do that remotely by buying that data. So that's not a failing, that's just a change in technology. I can't comment on any, any story about numbers or quality of recruitments. And I don't even know, I mean, I've been retired for, for years now. I would just say logically knowing the capabilities of big data and let's call this, this tech revolution big data, you can find out facts and derive additional facts from that data that you could not do 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. It's even so much better now than it was five years ago.
- [46:15]
Gordon Carrera
Open source intelligence and digital intelligence and cyber espionage, they all offer new ways of kind of stealing secrets.
- [46:23]
Glenn Chaffetz
Sure.
- [46:23]
Gordon Carrera
Getting hold of useful information, I guess.
- [46:25]
Glenn Chaffetz
And then you combine all of those.
- [46:27]
Gordon Carrera
But I guess what's interesting, isn't it, it's the fusion of all of these because you get a sense that these days, you know, human espionage is enabled by the digital or the open source. The kind of mixing of it means that the old days where you think back to the old kind of Cold War spy stories and it was always be about that kind of the kind of fighter pilot, you know, case officer or you know, MI6 officer, who is the individual who just, he's the kind of loan operator who would kind of go and talk that agent into being. That doesn't work in the modern spy world, does it? Because you need a kind of, you need digital analysts around you as well to build up the profile of the person you're going to talk to. You need maybe, you know, some cyber espionage around it. You might need some technical knowledge. It's a kind of, it's changed the kind of the game in that way.
- [47:13]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [47:13]
Glenn Chaffetz
I certainly think it's become much more of a team sport now than it used to be because of technology. I think the best operations have a bit of all of these elements in them. A lot of, a lot of cyber operations are enabled by Humint. A lot aren't. Right. Social engineering. I mean a lot of cyber operations are, are a result of people getting people's log ons. Right. Getting their credentials.
- [47:41]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [47:41]
Glenn Chaffetz
Simple things like overhearing a conversation or shoulder surfing can enable cyber operations. Parking a camera on a drone outside someone's window can see somebody type in a password. You slow it down and you see how they type it in. There's all kinds of ways to blend cyber and signal and human intelligence. And our adversaries do this every single day.
- [48:08]
David McCloskey
I wanted to go back because I think when we were talking about communication before the break, I parked a question on the kind of intelligence business model that we've built up versus maybe the Chinese one. And I'm curious if you think, are we adapting?
- [48:24]
Glenn Chaffetz
No.
- [48:25]
David McCloskey
Is our business model catching up? No. Yeah.
- [48:28]
Glenn Chaffetz
No, no, we're not. I mean we're playing two different games. So China, which is the best example, is an intelligent state in which the party state and companies, I won't call them the private sector because there is no true private sector in China, doesn't have a rule of law. They steal from each other just as they steal from us. But they have a national theft program. And NSA Director Keith Alexander, General Keith Alexander talked about this 20 years ago. It was the most massive transfer of wealth in human history. This is getting back to the neo mercantilism.
- [49:03]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [49:04]
Glenn Chaffetz
Where it's not to say that China doesn't innovate. It certainly does. But it doesn't have to innovate as much as, as we do because it's, we're subsidizing. It's R and D. American companies don't do that. It's against the law here. It's against the law to do it to ourselves and that's against the law to do it to Chinese companies. China doesn't have that problem. It's, it steals private sector information. This is again what I, what I work on now is helping companies protect themselves against this because they don't realize the degree and scale of the theft. And this has national security implications because essentially what China is doing, as the, the Ottomans and the Portuguese and the Dutch did to Venice, they're trying to put us out of business. And that's going to destroy, destroy our economy and it's going to destroy or certainly diminish our strength as a, as a state. And it's not just the United States, it's all of its allies. And I think very few companies are really are aware of this. And our national security establishment is not set up to deal with this. It was set up to do with the Cold War and to a certain degree, terrorism. It wasn't set up to deal with an adversary that wages a, a gray zone hybrid war on the US Private sector, national infrastructure.
- [50:21]
David McCloskey
My next question was going to be what keeps you up at night, Glenn? You might have just answered it.
- [50:25]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah, that, that does, I mean that keeps me up at night. Quantum, Quantum keeps me up at night. I mean the fact that, that companies are still rushing to do business with China knowing that their IP is at risk, at least understand what your valuable information is, is and take steps to protect it. But in many cases the information's not stolen, it's freely given away. I'll give you our IP if you allow us access to your market. I don't think that's worked out terribly well for the United States economy or private sector.
- [51:00]
David McCloskey
Maybe this is the question I'll close on then, which is just to go back to this central topic of tech and how it's impacting the espionage business for people who, I mean, who are listening everything, thinking about the job of a case officer. What do you think that job is going to look like in the future given all the changes we've talked about at the human level? What does that job look and feel like, do you think?
- [51:25]
Glenn Chaffetz
Yeah, you really put me on the spot there, David. That's, that's a huge question. I expect it's going to be, it's going to involve a lot more reliance on, on data and technology than it does now. I think the case officers now, I mean currently need to have much greater technological aptitude than they did back in my day. I think that's only going to increase to understand the capability of sensors, to understand the capability of computation, to be able to separate out fakes from reality. I don't think human, old fashioned, human, people to people relationships are ever going to disappear as Gordon was talking about a few minutes ago, but I think it's going to shrink because the idea of a case officer even protecting his identity and job has gotten so much more challenging. And so the way that China has dealt with this is they've turned their whole country into intelligence collectors through things like the National Intelligence law and the National Security Law and this, you know, massive intelligence establishment and a giant hacking cyber intrusion force. It's, it's an intelligent state. The way they've changed intelligence. And again, this is out in the open. You know, they don't hide their law. Oh, they say, oh, we, we wouldn't do that to you. Well then why do you have the law if, if you're not going to use your, your population as intelligence collectors? Why do you mandate that they become intelligence collectors? I think you're going to see a lot of that. I don't, I don't, I can't speak to the United States, but other countries, China, Russia among them, have blended the private sector together with the national security sector to make something that's even more dangerous.
- [53:18]
Gordon Carrera
Well, Glenn, I think that's probably a good place for us to wrap up. I think we've got a real understanding of why, you know, we started off with a former chief of MI6 saying adapt or die, basically when it comes to technology. And I think what we've hopefully done over these two episodes is unpick what that means, what technology is doing to both the intelligence business, but also to kind of privacy, privacy secrecy. You know, it's making us all kind of spied on all spies, but also kind of restricting the space for some of the old fashioned spying we think about. Not as easy to write about, is it for your books, David? I think think some of this stuff, it's kind of the reality. I mean, you do capture some of it in the novels. It's harder, isn't it?
- [53:57]
David McCloskey
It is. I deal with it every day. If when I'm writing or you're, you're trying to write a story about characters, about people, you know, in a business that is dealing less and less with actual human interaction. So a lot of the, a lot of the scenes that I would have written in books, you know, to Point Glenn, 15, 20 years ago, you know, they just, they don't happen. It's that meeting of the source in the parking garage. That's a great scene to write about. But does it work anymore? Not really. So the real downside here for novelists, novelists are the ultimate losers in this case.
- [54:34]
Glenn Chaffetz
Two words for you, David. Historical fiction.
- [54:36]
David McCloskey
Historical fiction. That's the, that's the takeaway. Revert to the past, baby. That's right.
- [54:42]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. Yeah, that's Right.
- [54:43]
David McCloskey
Thanks for joining us on this journey, Glenn. We, we appreciate you coming along and educating us and our, our listeners in this, I mean, hugely important topic and one that I think we'll be coming back to over and over again on the stories we tell on the pod. So thanks, thanks for being with us.
- [54:59]
Glenn Chaffetz
Thanks very much for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [55:01]
Gordon Carrera
So thanks to Glenn. Thank you all to listening. Just a reminder that if you want more of these kind of interviews with people who are, you know, insiders in the spy world, then do join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com where you'll get plenty more like that, won't they, David?
- [55:19]
David McCloskey
That's right. And Gordon, we'd be remiss if we didn't say we do have our live show coming up.
- [55:25]
Gordon Carrera
Oh yeah.
- [55:26]
David McCloskey
In London on the 31st of January. So you can go to the restisclassified.com I think we've still got a few tickets left. Get those there and join the club as well. We'll see you next time.
- [55:38]
Gordon Carrera
See you next time.
- [55:44]
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- [56:15]
Bill Durasmo
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- [56:44]
Hannah Fry
Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry.
- [56:46]
David McCloskey
And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment completely uninvited.
- [56:51]
Hannah Fry
We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course.
- [56:55]
David McCloskey
We're here to tell you about our brand new show, the Rest is Science.
- [56:59]
Hannah Fry
Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. You know our banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas.
- [57:10]
David McCloskey
Yeah, what is that about?
- [57:12]
Hannah Fry
So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a bananapocalypse. And now you. You will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.
- [57:25]
David McCloskey
Wow. Banana Candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana.
- [57:32]
Hannah Fry
So if you like scratching the surface.
- [57:34]
David McCloskey
Thinking a little bit deeper or weirder.
- [57:37]
Hannah Fry
Yes, definitely.
- [57:37]
David McCloskey
That too.
- [57:38]
Hannah Fry
You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.