Anthony Vinci is the author of the new book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America. He is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Q: What inspired you to write The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, and what do you see as the previous intelligence revolutions?
A: I signed up to be an intelligence officer twice. The first time as a 20-something year old where I became a case officer and was sent to Iraq. Then I left intelligence to run a tech company. The second time as the Associate Director and CTO of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (that’s the agency that does satellite imagery analysis).
Not only were these really different experiences, the first spent in the field trying to stop terrorists, the second behind a desk trying to transform an agency. But I also came to realize that the whole world of intelligence changed between those two stints. I witnessed a revolution in how intelligence was being done and even played a role in that revolution.
When I left the world of intelligence the second time, I realized that this story of an intelligence revolution needed to be told. In particular, I wanted to tell that story because I realized that this new form of intelligence affected everyone.
America formed its first centralized agency during WWII with the OSS. During the Cold War we professionalized intelligence with the CIA and other agencies. After 9/11 intelligence expanded into a so called whole of government approach with the birth of the Intelligence Community.
But now, in this fourth intelligence revolution, intelligence is expanding to affect us all, as foreign adversaries try to collect intelligence on everyone and target information operations at all of us.
That’s the story that I wanted to tell because I feel that the only way to defend ourselves, our families, and our communities is to be able to know what is going on and see the world through the lens of intelligence.
Q: The author Chris Miller said of the book, “With a career spanning tech companies and the intelligence community, Anthony Vinci knows the peril we face as adversaries use AI to sift and analyze enormous quantities of our data. Our only hope is to be faster and smarter. The Fourth Intelligence Revolution explains how we can compete.” What do you think of that description?
A: In the world of finance, stock traders once read everything they could about a company and used that information to make a trade. But around the 1980s, hedge funds started to realize that machines could take in all that information, quantitatively analyze it, and trade better and faster than people.
Flash forward to today, now it’s nearly impossible to trade the stock market as a hedge fund without having some level of quantitative analysis using data analytics and, increasingly, AI. There is just too much data, the markets are just too complicated and everything moves too fast for humans to keep up.
Even more importantly, these hedge funds are competing with other hedge funds that are using quantitative analysis, and the only way to keep up was to adopt the same quantitative approach.
The same thing is happening in intelligence. The world is becoming too complex, there is too much data, and things move too fast to keep up without AI. And things are only getting faster and more complex. Soon our military will move to fighting primarily with drones and other autonomous systems, as things are moving to in Ukraine, and then humans truly won’t be able to keep up.
Chris is right. We need to adopt AI if we have any hope of keeping up not only because of all the data but because, just like in financial markets, it is a competition, and our adversaries are doing the same.
Q: How did your background in tech and intelligence inform the writing of the book?
A: In order to understand something, sometimes you have to see it from the perspective of an outsider. When I came back into the government as CTO I had this outside experience from running a tech start up and so I saw these intelligence agencies in a totally new way.
This was my superpower. I could look at what seemed normal to everyone else who had spent their careers in government and say that “hey, there is a better, faster, more agile way to do things.” I had seen how small tech companies could move so fast and invent the future while they were flying the plane. I tried to bring that culture into my intelligence agency.
The same has been true in writing this book. I tried to look at intelligence from a totally different, outsider perspective. I didn’t want to write the same book that people had read a million times before, using a lot of acronyms and talking about obscure global events and classified operations.
Instead, I tried to imagine myself as someone who had never stepped foot inside an agency and talk about what it is really like. And I tried to tell that story with technology, in particular, in mind. It’s technology that is affecting all of our lives now, whether we work inside the CIA or at an insurance company.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to AI's impact on U.S. espionage?
A: We are watching in our society as AI is being used to do almost everything. Filmmakers are worried because AI apps like Sora can now make films. Attorneys are worried because AI can now write legal documents. Even doctors are worried because AI can be used to make diagnoses.
The same is true for intelligence. AI will be used to do much of what is done by intelligence officers today. It is already being used to comb through data or to perform some forms of analysis. This is work that is usually done by expert analysts with PhDs in International Relations. Indeed, the current Director of NGA said in a speech that the agency is now publishing reports which “no human hands have touched.”
This is a good and necessary thing if we are going to keep up with the national security threats in a complex and dangerous world. But it is also going to cause the same sort of disruption that we see in other industries. If AI can do these missions, then what will intelligence officers do? How must we train or retrain people? Can we trust what these AI systems say?
We are going to answer all those questions and I am very convinced that like with every other industry, AI will play a beneficial role, but it is going to be a difficult time as we transition and get things right.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am putting into practice what I preach in the book. I’ve co-founded a tech company called Vico where we are automating intelligence analysis with AI. This is what I tried to do when I was at NGA, but the technology was not quite ready.
Today it is ready. We are forecasting the future better than most people using tech built by a handful of smart PhDs and without any classified information in the mix. It’s exciting and shows you what is possible.
We are also democratizing this capability, which is another big theme of my book. I want companies and everyday people to be able to use tools as powerful as those available to the world’s intelligence agencies.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I think a lot of people can see the world of espionage as something that happens on TV or in far-off countries. They read books written by intelligence officers who tell their tales of derring-do in places like Afghanistan or East Germany. Those are great stories and necessary to tell (and I might even tell a story or two like that in my book!).
But the main story I wanted to tell was about what it is really like in the world of intelligence - sort of a user’s guide for our intelligence community - and how intelligence affects us all. Afghanistan and East Germany are no longer the frontlines of the world of espionage, cell phones are.
I hope that all those readers out there who read every book about espionage and current affairs, like me, will read my book. But, really, I hope that those readers who have never read anything about espionage will pick up my book because I think that this world of espionage now affects an IT worker, a mom with teenagers, or a city council member as much as it does that shadowy spy on the streets of Kabul.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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