Consider This from NPR - How AI Is Transforming National Security

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Artificial Intelligence is front of mind these days. Many of us are spending a lot of time pondering how AI can make our lives easier. Or on the flip side — whether it's going to put us out of a job. But how would you be thinking about AI... if you were in charge of a major US intelligence agency? NPR's Mary Louise Kelly spoke to FBI Director Chris Wray and National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone about Artificial Intelligence as a national security threat.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

More than three decades ago, the makers of the spy thriller Sneakers imagined a world where a tool existed to hack into all the major government computer systems. Give me the number for something impossible to access. What about this? Federal Reserve Transfer Node, Culpeper, Virginia. That sure did look. That'll do. Punch it in. Okay.

You won't get in. Look at this, boys. Anybody want to shut down the Federal Reserve? National power grid. Anybody want to black out New England? Okay. Carl, what else? Air traffic control system.

Now, 30 years after the movie's release, data breaches in all sorts of computer systems, business, government, personal, they're a regular occurrence. Equifax, the credit monitoring company, says the social security numbers of 143 million Americans may have been exposed. One of the nation's largest health care providers is under siege. A major cyber attack forcing hospital ERs to turn away patients in multiple states. Using computers as portals, both to information and to chaos, is no longer fantasy. In 2022, more than 400 million Americans had their personal information compromised.

And they're not the only targets. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russian cyber spies hacked into the computers belonging to the Democratic National Committee. As you know, somebody hacked into the DNC computer and Wikileaks just recently published a bunch of these emails. And there are a number of emails in which senior officials of the Democratic National Committee can be seen conspiring against Bernie Sanders. State-sponsored hackers also use compromised data to undermine U.S. national security. Here is then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper testifying before Congress in 2017. Russia has clearly assumed an even more aggressive cyber posture by increasing

cyber espionage operations, leaking data stolen from these operations, and targeting critical infrastructure systems. As technology gets better and better, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, cyber attacks have become a go-to tool for spies and a growing national security threat. Consider this, nations have been spying on one another for millennia, but now in the age of technology and artificial intelligence, it has become easier to obtain information about enemies and even allies, and that ease can have devastating consequences. Coming up, we hear from two men responsible for protecting the United States from threats at home and abroad. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, January 15th.

It's Consider This from NPR. Artificial intelligence is front of mind these days. Many of us are spending a lot of time pondering how AI can make our lives easier, or on the flip side, whether it's going to put us out of a job. But how would you be thinking about AI if you were in charge of a major U.S. intelligence agency? I recently put that question to FBI Director Chris Wray. How does AI complicate his mission? At the moment where it's most dangerous is taking what I would call kind of JV criminal actors or foreign actors and making them varsity level. What I'm more concerned about is the day which is coming fast where AI is going to be good enough to take the sort of black belt adversaries and make them that much more effective. Chris Wray and I were speaking on stage at an international conference on cybersecurity at Fordham University in New York. With us was the director of another U.S. spy agency, General Paul Nakasone,

who runs the National Security Agency, which does surveillance, code-breaking, cyber-snooping. What you're going to hear these next few minutes is part of our conversation. Here's General Nakasone picking up with something he is focused on, protecting AI. Interesting that our adversaries, they're all using U.S. AI models, which tells me that the best AI models are made by U.S. companies. So that tells me that we need to protect that competitive advantage of our nation, of our national economy going forward. So how do we do that? How do we ensure that what we're doing in signals intelligence is giving the insights to what U.S. companies need to know in terms of how do you protect your intellectual property? What's the

tradecraft? What are the techniques? Who are the actors that are going to come after you? And how are they going to do that? Is China the most formidable adversary in this space? Well, China has a bigger hacking program than that of every other major nation combined and has stolen more of Americans' personal and corporate data than every nation, big or small, combined. If I took the FBI's cyber personnel and I said,

forget ransomware, forget Russia, forget Iran, do nothing but China, we would be outnumbered 50 to 1. 50 to 1? 50 to 1. And that's probably a conservative estimate because the Chinese government has also shown a penchant, like some of those other countries, to hire cyber criminals or enlist the help of cyber criminals. So that's additional workforce, if you will, that they can take advantage of that I can assure you we don't. And so from a scale perspective, the most sweeping

and broad threat to our innovation, our intellectual property, and in the long run, our economic and national security is the People's Republic of China. And I want to be clear, not the Chinese people, not Chinese Americans, certainly, who are often the victims of Chinese government overreach, but the Chinese Communist Party. So state-sponsored? State-sponsored. What do they want to know? Just about every industry that's out there, they want to target what makes it tick. We've seen it in everything from biotech to aviation to advanced technologies like AI to different forms of healthcare, agriculture. You can go right on down the list. It's everything from Fortune 100 companies to

small startups out in Silicon Valley. Every one of our 56 field offices has investigations that lead back to the Chinese government. We've had an increase over the last, I don't know how many years, of about 1,300 percent in how many investigations related to the Chinese government threat that we're pursuing. At one point, not that long ago, we were opening a new China-related investigation every 12 hours. And I can assure you that it's not because FBI agents don't have enough else to do. General Nakasone, from your purge, what does that look like? Are you out 50 to 1?

So I would begin with, of course we're never going to match them quantitatively. This is not where our advantage is. Our advantage is qualitatively. This is the partnerships that we have. This is the insights that we get from our incredible U.S. intelligence community. This is the work that we do with academia. This is the workforce that we have. We will never be able to match the number of hackers that China has. But I will tell you what, the number is one thing. The quality is a complete another one. And so the soundbite shouldn't be 50 to 1. The soundbite should be what is the qualitative advantage that the United States has and how do we maintain that.

That's the piece that I think that Chris and I are so committed to is to make sure that we have that continuing edge in terms of what we're able to do. General Paul Nakasone there of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command and FBI Director Chris Wray. Well, we also talked about Russia and about the extent to which in this era of artificial intelligence and cyber espionage, the extent to which they are still focused on actual human spies running around. Here's my question to Ray. You gave comments at the spy museum last year in which you said you were talking about the Russian counterintelligence threat and you said the number of Russian spies operating inside the U.S. is, quote, still way too big. How big? I'm not going to give a number.

I will tell you that over the last several years, let's say the last five years, we have made significant strides in expelling Russian spies, as have a whole slew of our allies. But we haven't done enough of it. And there are, as I said in the earlier event, there are too many Russian spies here. We are a target-rich environment for all the Russian intelligence services. And it shouldn't be lost on anyone that we're sitting here not far from the UN. And you can draw your own conclusions from my concerns there. What do they want to know? They want to know what we know. That's the essence of spying. So it helps them make better decisions. Intelligence ultimately

is just information that drives decision making. So they want to learn as much as they can about what we think, what we're concerned about, because it'll inform their decision making. And it's part of our role, as it has been for 115 years, to try to block that. General, you look... I was waiting for the number. I wanted to write that down. You ask him. He'll tell you. So I spent time at the field office here in New York City. Fantastic opportunity for me to better understand what goes on in the largest field office in America and in the FBI. And part of that is also to think about, so how do we use our signals intelligence capability to better understand the missions and requirements to finding these spies? How do I identify the patterns outside the United States with foreign actors that would give us an indication that, hey, Chris, this is where we can assist? This is,

again, I think where we've tried to think differently about our partnership, whether or not it's been on the NSA side or the cybercom side to say, okay, hard challenge, problem, this is what we can bring to it. That was National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone and FBI Director Chris Wray. This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Karen Zamora. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. it's consider this from NPR I'm Mary Louise Kelly