CIA plans to replace spies with AI
Human spies will soon be relics of the past, and the CIA knows it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Agency’s deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida the CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent.
ROBERT STEELE: CIA is in desperate need of adult leadership. Dawn Meyerriecks is not stupid, just ignorant. She does not understand that CIA has not done real spying for decades, a tiny handful of cases not-with-standing, nor does she understand that counterintelligence is never, ever, going to be resolved by computers that process 1% of what is collected which is 1% of what is digital which is in turn 1% of what is analog. I continue to believe that we need to shut down NSA, NRO, NGA, and DIA, and consolidate the 30% (“at best”) of each into a radically restructured CIA, but if the above kind of idiocy is what passes for “management” at CIA these days, it may be time to just zero out CIA as well and start over with an Open Source Agency that powers seven radically reduced secret “spokes.”
To her credit, she is focused on the problem of being a spy living in a total surveillance world (China and Russia are at the forefront of “zero access” for US spies) but she simply does not understand that she should be spending 80% of her time helping CIA access the 90% of the information it ignores now: open source information, generally in languages CIA does not speak.
I am offended by the failure of CIA's “leaders” at multiple levels, most of which I documented in my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (2000), with a Foreword by President David Boren of one of my alma maters, the University of Oklahoma, whom I helped in a small way when he sought to pass the National Security Act of 1992 while Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Nothing has changed, indeed, US secret intelligence today is more expensive and less effective today than ever before.
01 CIA is not a serious intelligence agency. It does nothing on eight of the nine high-level threats to humanity and in the two threat areas where it does operate, war and terrorism, it is the threat, not the solution.
02 CIA has no major clandestine assets of note. It relies heavily on foreign liaison hand-outs that it pretends it obtained via clandestine means. So-called unilateral assets managed by officers under official cover (including the quasi official cover of non-governmental organizations) are all blown.
03 CIA does not receive signals intelligence support from NSA for tactical clandestine operations planning and execution. Were NSA to do so, CIA's ability to do unilateral operations would improve by a factor of ten overnight.
04 CIA does not allow the development and management of overt human assets. This means that CIA is leaving 90% of the relevant knowledge — most of it not published in analog or digital form — on the street.
05 Even if CIA were to become competent at both clandestine and overt human intelligence, its child analysts are loosely educated and lack the processing tools defined by Diane Webb, Dennis McCormick, and Gordon Oehler in 1989.
06 CIA has no constructive understanding of how to do true cost economics.
07 CIA refuses to be serious about multinational operations & analysis.
CIA built the Artificial Intelligence Staff in the Office of Information Technology (OIT/AIS) around me in 1986, and I was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (AIPASG) when I moved to be come the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps Intelligence, responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA). It is now clear to me that there are two levels of information technology in the world: the secret space program at a level of excellence that can only be described as extra-terrestial; and the day to day business as usual level, idiocy by design. I am very much looking forward to the full disclosure of the first and the demise of the second. We the People are not being well served by a government that continues to enable a Western economic and political paradigm rooted in 50% waste and 90% profit taking by the 1%.
Learn more: http://robertdavidsteele.com
