While many consider rapid technological change to be a positive development, technology also can lead to vulnerabilities. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said “it’s difficult to predict how technology will affect national security [in] tech areas like artificial intelligence, health care and agriculture.”
Speaking at the 2016 Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington on Sept. 7, Clapper noted how the biggest taxi and hotel companies in the world do not own any cars or property, a reference to Uber and Airbnb, respectively. These technologies and changes, he said, have the potential to revolutionize our lives for the better or create vulnerabilities.
A recent study published by the RAND corporation chronicled the disruptive nature technology developed in the commercial world — and thus available to any hacker, activist or government — will have on U.S. soldiers and intelligence operators deployed to urban battlefields.
These technologies “are persistent and are dual-use, which means that they can benefit society or harm it. Although they are intended for commercial purposes, such as learning about shoppers’ preferences and finding new markets, they can easily be used by police and security services to identify and track criminals, terrorists, insurgents and spies,” the report said.
Moreover, technologies such as mobile communication devices, commercial GPS and commercial unmanned aircraft have the potential to “disrupt military intelligence operations and to jeopardize the plans, actions, and security of the war fighter. In turn, the intelligence officer, the war fighter, and others who often live and work on the margins and in the gaps of society can use many of these same technologies to skirt government control, as well as to enhance the effectiveness of their operations,” the report continued.
One of the biggest challenges articulated by top Pentagon officials has been the technology boom that has occurred outside its walls. Technologies today “live out there as we do in a world where a lot of technology doesn’t come from us. It comes from the commercial world and we need to feed upon that,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in March.
“I think the biggest challenge for national security in the 21
stCentury as opposed to the 20
thCentury is that the things that are most likely to affect the future the most are going to be developed outside of the Defense Department,” William Roper, director of the Strategic Capabilities Office, said in June. “The commercial technologies we just referred to are available to anyone given the resources to invest in them. The U.S. still has many advantages in [the] military technology sphere, and organizations like DARPA are working hard to make sure that military unique technology is something that’s always going to be part of our cutting edge.”
According to Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the terrorist threat facing the nation now is broader, wider and deeper than at any point in the recent past. Plotting attacks takes place much quicker and with a lot less warning than in the past, one reason being “the way technology is available to terrorists,” Rasmussen said during a panel at the Intelligence and National Security Summit.
He added that the job of counterterrorism professionals is getting harder and the job of terrorists, or at least the low level terrorists, is getting easier. This is due to the fact that today’s terrorists “have access to communications and weapons technologies and understanding that simply didn’t exist for terrorists a decade ago or even five years ago,” he said. This access to technologies gives them an edge.
Michael Leiter, Rasmussen’s predecessor and fellow panelist, told C4ISRNET following the panel that “commercially available encryption is causing a huge challenge to law enforcement and intelligence communities. It’s not that intelligence and law enforcement ever had a perfect vision into what [terrorists] were doing anyway, but the widely available nature of commercial encryption makes surveillance … much more difficult. And terrorists understand that and they’re taking advantage of it.”
He added that terrorists are also trying to take advantage of technologies such as drones and cyber. Terrorists, especially the homegrown extremists, don’t need very advanced technology to make a big difference, he said. “Largely, the edge that [terrorists have] gotten is an appreciation of our weaknesses and how they can do things without great technology,” he said. Terrorists like simple things that work, such as driving large trucks laden with explosives through crowds or barriers or travel to nations where automatic weapons are readily available, he added.
One facet of technology that the intelligence community is using to improve its posture is the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, or IC ITE (pronounced “eye sight”). Clapper said IC ITE is trying to take the IC to the next level of integration and information sharing adding it’s not just about an IT upgrade, but more about making a fundamental change in the way the IC operates in terms of processes and people.
He also said he expects IC ITE to last beyond his and the current administration’s tenure. He said that one of the reasons he stayed at his post as long as he did — at six years, longer than any of his predecessors — was to ensure IC ITE could be so entrenched as to not be undone.
