Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Dr. Anthony Vinci
Dr. Anthony Vinci is a former Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director of Capabilities at the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and author of 'The Fourth Intelligence Revolution.'
Episode Summary
In this episode of One Decision, guest host Rosanna Lockwood and Sir Richard Dearlove, former Chief of MI6, are joined by Dr. Anthony Vinci, the former Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director of Capabilities at the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), as well as the author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America. Dr. Vinci discusses how advances in intelligence and technology are reshaping global relationships and creating new challenges. He also highlights how intelligence is no longer limited to governments and its impact on everyday life. The group also explores how AI is changing the way disinformation is spread, as well as the risks associated with Chinese control over platforms like TikTok, and why democracies are increasingly vulnerable when facing authoritarian surveillance states.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Lockwood: You're saying we're gonna have to train people to think like intelligence officers while scrolling TikTok. How does how does that work?
Dearlove: What I find really disconcerting about the world you're describing is that we're not talking about intelligence and security activity within a defined space. We're talking about something which is almost unlimited. It intervenes in every aspect of life.
Vinci: People have this impression that you use intelligence to win a war. Actually, the the highest and best use of intelligence is that it keeps you from ever going to war because you make better decisions.
INTRODUCTION
Lockwood: Hello, and welcome to One Decision. I'm guest host Rosanna Lockwood, joined by my cohost as ever Sir Richard Dearlove. Now in today's episode, we're gonna be talking to Anthony Vinci, first chief technology officer and associate director of capabilities at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the NGA, where he led efforts to adopt AI driven capabilities across NGA operations and strengthen collaborations with tech innovators in Silicon Valley. He is also the author of the new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America, which traces the evolution of espionage from World War Two all the way to present day, arguing that the confluence of AI and US-China competition has created the most dangerous period of espionage in history. So let's get into it. Great to see you there, Doctor Anthony Vinci. Thanks so much for joining us. Now you cover in the book Russian disinformation campaigns, North Korean hacks, China's ascendancy, TikTok, AI. I mean so much is covered throughout the history of espionage and you're arguing that we're in the middle of this sort of fourth intelligence revolution. Just for listeners who haven't read the book yet, what makes this revolution so fundamentally different from the prior three?
INTERVIEW
Vinci: Like the previous three, it's being driven by a geopolitical enemy, a new one, this time in China, and by new technology, this time in AI. But I would say that it's become the biggest revolution of them all because of two factors. One, this geopolitical adversary in China is, in my view, the most powerful adversary America has ever come up against, in that they have an economy that is nearly as large as America's and potentially soon to be larger, and that will drive it having a bigger military, potentially a bigger intelligence community. And then AI, I think, is one of, and if not the biggest changes in technology in history, that will have one of the biggest revolutionary effects across all parts of society and the economy and the military and so forth. And because of just these great changes, we're gonna see a massive change in intelligence.
Lockwood: So Richard, you know, we talked about the history that's evolved in this book, and Anthony really traces it all the way back from a kind of post war era onwards. With your experience in espionage through those decades, what do you make of what's happening now? Do you agree with the argument we're in this sort of fourth revolution?
Dearlove: Yes, I think I do and I'm rather engaged by Anthony's arguments. I think one of the basics in understanding the world of intelligence and security is that it is ultimately threat driven, and the threats are variable, change, and I think that change has been massively accelerated by the sophistication and advance of technology, which are both tools for attack and of course tools for being attacked. But I've got a sort of basic question I want to ask Anthony first. We'll dispose of that. I mean, if I categorize myself from your book, I'm from the golden era, which you described as sort of cold war. I was a frontline case officer during the cold war, and I absolutely accept your thesis. But the one thing I would say is if you can talk directly to the guy, you know, who is planning the technical attack or the person who is building this architecture and sort of understand it from the inside, you still get that massive human overview. Although, you know, we have this formidable technical challenge now, I would still like to think there is a space, an important space in there in espionage for the human source.
Vinci: I actually fully agree with you. And I was a case officer in the chaos age, right, in the third age. You know, when I got out of the farm, I went straight to Iraq. That was my first duty station. And we did intelligence then in a certain way. It was different than, you know, kind of the golden age. Like, I learned from Cold War guys. Right? That's the way I was taught to do it. And then what drove the book actually for me was that when I got to NGA, I sort of saw the beginning of this next stage and started thinking about exactly the kinds of questions you're asking. Like, what is the role of human in a world where AI is driving all sorts of technology, where cyber attacks become autonomous, and or drones are autonomous. And I agree with your fundamental view, which is that human will continue to be valuable. In fact, in some ways, may become the most valuable int. In the sense that it is by using human sources that we can kind of skirt around the technologies. And if intelligence becomes more and more automated, how do you battle that? Well, potentially go and recruit the person who developed the technology, and potentially that becomes a way for you to learn about how these new technologies work, or, you know, if you get into the world of covert action, potentially change how these AI technologies work. But I do think the job of a case officer is gonna completely change. I think the days of where you could kind of use, you know, a dinner tab and chalk as a means to run a human operation are pretty much over.
Dearlove: But now it strikes me that, as you said, that this role in the traditional sense is impossible. So the role of the case officer has to be conceived within this extraordinary technical framework. I mean, without going into detail, is this the sort of end of face to face contact, let's say? So, everything is going to have to be encapsulated within some sort of technical arrangement.
Vinci: It may go the other way, actually, which is that people may not trust anything that they see online, or that is communicated via any electronic means. That we, you know, and I feel like society may be heading in that direction, even even today, where we all know that things can be faked so easily. And so only human to human, face to face communication may be what's trusted. And in that world, you know, I think we're gonna actually need many more case officers. Right? Because the only way that we'll be able to ever, you know, get another person to trust us is to go and meet them in person, and speak their language, right? And not have it moderated through automatic translation or something. That you will have to know their language, and know their culture, and be able to build the trust, and do all those things that a case officer has always been taught to do, right? And that may be the future, so it becomes even more valuable to have these people around.
Lockwood: Anthony, can we just so rewind to about 2016 because a sort of decent portion of your book is dedicated to the work of the Internet Research Agency, it was known IRA in Russia at the time which led those huge disinformation campaigns that led to a lot of what we've come to see today and the way the world has played out. And you talk about it as asymmetric warfare, these asymmetric attacks, these disinformation campaigns, but the field has moved on so dramatically now with AI and with technology. How do those types of disinfo tactics we saw during say the 2016 election that saw Trump gain his first presidency with, you know, social media being used. How does that stack up with what's happening now? How is Russia and more importantly, how is China using AI for these types of asymmetric attacks?
Vinci: You know, look, propaganda and information operations have been around forever, probably since the beginning of civilization. And what Russia was able to do in 2016 that was so interesting is that they were able to sort of asymmetrically be this, like, parasite on top of American networks and technology companies, like Facebook, just to take a relatively small investment in a propaganda campaign, an information operation campaign, and spread it to millions and even potentially hundreds of millions of people in America. And you're right, since then, a lot has changed, and I would kinda point to two things in particular. One is that what we saw with the rise of TikTok is that an authoritarian country now owns one of these platforms. So, it's not just about riding on top of it. TikTok is a platform owned by China, controlled by China still. By owning and controlling that platform, they have control over how an information operation can be carried out. And where I believe that AI is going, in terms of information operations, is that it is going to do what I call hacking minds. It is no longer about the advertising model of information operations and propaganda, where you show a person a video or an image, and hope that that convinces them, that influences them in some way. AI is a dialogue. Right? AI is this arbiter of information. When we get on ChatGPT, or Claude, or one of these systems, you're taking part in a conversation much the way you would with a person. You ask it a question, it asks you a question back, and it can go back and forth. And what that's gonna allow these systems to do is to convince you of something, potentially. In the way that Richard and I might have been taught to convince someone to do something as case officers. Where you're developing a source, you're developing someone over time to do what you want them to do. You understand their motivations, and then try to influence what they're gonna do. And it's okay to some degree if those AI systems are owned by western democracies and can be regulated. But where it gets really dangerous is either when an authoritarian country owns one of them, the way China owns DeepSeek, or where they've hacked them or infiltrated them in some way to take over their capability to start influencing people. That's where it's gonna get dangerous. That's where I think that information operations are going.
Dearlove: What I find really disconcerting about the world you're describing, and I entirely accept that analysis, is that we're not talking about intelligence and security activity within a defined space. We're talking about something which is almost unlimited. It intervenes in every aspect of life, and not just at the governmental level down to the level of individual characters who probably have no concept of the strategic importance of the world that you and I lived in. So, on the one hand, you know, there's a massive sort of educational problem. There is a massive generalization of the threat, and it seems to me that, you know, this is an extension of a specialized world into public life, daily life, which is very, very frightening.
Vinci: I think that you've assessed it exactly right, in that I believe what's happening is that all people are becoming the target of espionage and influence campaigns. And the root of this is that within authoritarian societies, like China, and like Russia, North Korea, any number of them, people are the targets of internal security services because those countries use information to control their people. They want to spy on their entire population, and then they use that to control them. So China has created this sort of dystopian surveillance society, in which all information is collected from online, from phones, from cameras, by the government, and then it's used for social control. And I believe what's happening is that China is essentially exporting that dystopian surveillance system, and expanding its espionage globally to America, to Europe, to Africa, and so forth, through platforms like TikTok, through infrastructure systems like Huawei, which allow it to tap into a telecom system, through hacking campaigns like Salt Typhoon, which have allowed them to access all Americans' telecommunications information. All of it. And then they want to use this ultimately for influence. And it's not as straightforward as it is within China, because they can't just dictate a social credit system. So they have to use more subtle methods like TikTok. I believe they'll eventually use education technologies of which China owns many, like the Princeton Review. They'll use video games, again, of which China owns many. They own 40% of Epic Games. They own 100% of Riot Games. And the reason that they're doing this is they've realized, again, through this asymmetric form of power, that the general populace is less defended. There's no classified information. And in a democracy, the general population is the power center.
Lockwood: As Sir Richard says, you know, citizens are themselves becoming the targets and also the kind of vehicle through which espionage is being conveyed and carried, and you call this the democratization of intelligence. And you're saying, Anthony, that basically in your book you say learning to think like an intelligence officer, like teaching the average civilian how to think like that is the only defense. But if we think about something like TikTok, from a policy perspective, the US government hasn't even been that successful yet. They keep extending this deadline on the sale of the ownership of TikTok by ByteDance. Because as I think Trump said at some point, you know, people love their TikToks, their TikToks or whatever he called it, you know. It's very hard to wrest popular things like video games and TikToks and social currency like that out of the hands of public who want to use it. Of course, if you could ban it wholesale, it would, you know, cut that threat off. But if you can't, what's the solution? You're saying we're gonna have to train people to think like intelligence officers while scrolling TikTok. How does how does that work?
Vinci: Yeah. I think that our entire system for combating espionage, in a sense, was built for these prior eras. Right? A lot of it was really built for the Cold War period. We have counterintelligence officers, right, in the CIA or in the FBI and so forth who go after individual spies. That's just simply not going to work in a world where, you know, information is being collected about hundreds of millions of people and where information operations happen. And you wouldn't even necessarily want it to function like that because we don't necessarily want the FBI or the CIA controlling information by censoring it, for example. Even if we know that it is planted disinformation from the GRU or the MSS, the only way to kind of create a resiliency, I believe, is to go to the endpoint, to go to the people to whom the intelligence operations are being targeted. You need everyone who owns a computer or phone to defend themselves at least a little bit, to change their passwords or, you know, not click on phishing emails or something. Well, you need to sort of now do the same thing for espionage and for information operations. And by training people, I think letting people understand here's the threat, and here's what you can do about it. And even doing this with children because children are preyed upon as well. TikTok was prosecuted for taking Americans' information, including the information of minors and sending it back to China. So, Richard, do you think that's possible to get the general public up to speed like that?
Dearlove: I think it might be because, I mean, because of, you know, social media, because of the way that information now you can reach many more people more quickly, and the ability to communicate general messages and to educate, let's say, your populace. It's feasible, but of course you have to have a government that understands the problem and is willing to take the initiatives. And I think that there will be quite a lot of resistance socially to taking that step forward until people understand better maybe the seriousness of the problem.
Lockwood: Not making a case for authoritarianism here. Never would I do such a thing. And we're talking about defending, you know, democracies from authoritarian governments. But clearly authoritarian governments have spied that democracy is a structural weakness when you're talking about that tension that Sir Richard was saying about the security services wanting perhaps to do things that government policy may not be able to do, where it comes to things like surveilling the public or making sure that the public are well looked after, because a democracy like the US, like the UK, doesn't want a surveillance state. They don't want some kind of crackdown that's looking at everyone, you know. We don't want that type of thing happening. So if you've got that kind of weakness, what is the defense?
Vinci: There's this sort of interesting asymmetry between democracies and authoritarian nations when it comes to this. Right? Like, I think you're sort of getting at that. That the way you attack each one is radically different, and the way you defend each one is radically different. In the US and in the West, we have this open system. So it's actually very easy to push propaganda. Right? You can literally buy the ad and put it out there. Or you can make a company and look how hard it is to make TikTok illegal. DeepSeek is still perfectly legal and downloadable. So it's very easy to push attacks, but at the same time, what's different here and where I think we have an advantage in the West is that we actually kind of trust our populations and empower them and give them tools to, you know, understand information, to combat information attacks. Like people can form these groups on Reddit or other social media platforms and say, this is fake and, you know, look at that. We can have community notes like they do on X and so forth. It's sort of the opposite in China or Russia, highly controlled societies. It's very hard to push propaganda in that sense. Right? Because while they can just go and censor it immediately, you know, Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and so forth are illegal there, so you can't kind of control the platforms. At the same time, however, they don't trust their population at all. And so any defense has to come from the government. And so I think that, well, first one thing, I talk less about blue operations, about our side, because, you know, I don't wanna reveal what we're doing. But I would say at a high level, I think it's about taking advantage of those asymmetries. Right? And I think it's about, well, if everything is centralized, right, in China, so all the information is centralized, if you can get into that centralization process, then you can push it out. The other thing is that at a technological level, AI, you know, remember, even the Chinese made AI systems kind of ride off of the western systems. Like, DeepSeek was trained by leveraging ChatGPT and these big models, and most information that these models will be trained on come from the West. So those models are learning from Western information and then reprocessing it. And so they will naturally have this Western view, for lack of a better word. Right? And so what China now has to do is spend huge amounts of money and effort to like censor these models. And that's what they're trying to do now, is less, like, build them. They're figuring out how to censor them. And so we've given them this big challenge, and they can succeed at this basic level and make it so that, you know, DeepSeek will not talk about Tiananmen Square or Winnie the Pooh or any of these kinda like trigger words. But they can't yet censor the basic thinking about how information works, or the value of, you know, a capitalist system, or liberty, or something like that. So, it still can kinda infiltrate through the AI. I know that's a little abstract, but it's a way to think about how soft power can translate into this world of AI.
Dearlove: The strength of what we have in the West speaks for itself for all of its faults and vulnerabilities, and therefore, we don't, as it were, need to propagandize our own system. But there is one of the things in your book you talk about are these new intelligence domains. Behind AI and coming down the track reasonably fast is quantum computing, and it will transform the technical world that we're talking about when it is combined with AI. I mean, how do you see that additional threat, which in a way will supercharge many of the issues that we've actually been talking about already?
Vinci: It's unclear exactly when, you know, there will be so called quantum supremacy when all previous encryption will be crackable. You know, is that a year or ten years? But it will happen at some point, and I think it's gonna change the world, because it's going to create a world in which all of the previous information is now available to anyone. It's gonna release secrets. There is this movie Sneakers with Robert Redford from the early nineties, where they kind of imagined that scenario, right, and the dangers of it. And I think it may actually happen. I think what that will mean for, you know, intelligence agencies is that they will now have access to all sorts of information, a lot of which could be dangerous. It could include, for example, nuclear secrets and things like this that are incredibly dangerous for society and the world as a whole. And I worry less about Russia or China having access to a quantum computer. I worry more about, you know, a smaller kind of revolutionary country, the equivalent of, like, in Iran, for example, having access or even a nonstate group, like a terrorist organization or religious fanatic organization of some form. Like, that could be incredibly dangerous. What I think is gonna get really interesting and sporty is what happens when regular people in society now have access to this information and can pull out, you know, economic secrets. Like what happens to Bitcoin when encrypted wallets can now be decrypted? What happens to all the private information that has been sent between people for years and decades, and people get their hands on, and is now released, or is leaked out from various governments. And that's gonna cause all sorts of social disruption, I think, in authoritarian countries and in democratic countries. And that kind of disruption can create revolutions in countries, for example, when people realize what their governments have done over the years and have access to this. So, it's gonna be massively disruptive. It's unclear when it's gonna happen, but it is definitely going to happen.
Lockwood: Oh, I'll add that to my new list of worries. The fifth intelligence revolution. I just wanna talk to you about government for a second and, you know, what they're doing. We already talked about, you know, what the West is doing in terms of countering these types of attack, but I say this because I've spent time in Russia as well, same as Richard here behind the Iron Curtain, I've spent time in the Far East as well, in Singapore, covering China, and my main concern when coming back to the UK, back to the West, was that we're sleeping on the China threat. I know you aren't, I know you gentlemen certainly aren't, you've seen it coming for a long time, but culturally, in societies, like you say in your book Anthony, you can still board a flight to Beijing with no issue at all. You can't to Moscow right now. There's a really big difference in terms of the way the countries have been cut off or viewed, so you've got much more of a kind of open relationship with China. They're an adversary but not really a kind of enemy at the moment. When you look at the way governments are handling policy around things like TikTok, around things like cyber security and data and advanced chip exports for example to the Middle East which can then go on to Asia, do you think that Western governments, particularly the US, are alive enough to the China threat?
Vinci: I mean, that's the debate. You know, when you're in the Beltway in the Washington DC area, this is a massive debate where you've got these strong China hawks on one side, of which I'd include myself as one, versus I wouldn't say that there are true doves anymore, but they're more dovish people, including in the military, but definitely in congress and in the administration, who sort of look at the practicalities of the economic integration between the West and China, and sort of look at it from a perspective of just like the reality is we can't just decouple the economies the way, say, the Soviet Union was decoupled from the world economy. And so I'd sort of point out two sticking points. You know, one is that because of economic integration, all weapons are grenades and not bullets. Right? Everything has blowback. You can't just sort of say, we wanna weaken China in this way, so we're gonna export restrict all semiconductors. That will have a blowback effect on your own economy and society, for example. It might lead China to develop its own semiconductors faster, and now you have no leverage. It might lead to a major recession or depression globally. You know, just think about it this way, if the Chinese economy went into a depression, everybody else's would as well. They would drag everyone else down. Right? The other thing is that there's still some truth to wanting some level of integration. So in some ways, keeping the competition at this level is a good thing, because it mitigates the risk of total war. My read of what's happening is that both sides are just incrementally preparing themselves for more and more decoupling over time. So the US is trying to develop its own rare earth supply chain, so that we're not as dependent on China. Meanwhile, China is trying to create its own semiconductor supply chain so it's less dependent on us. And we're both sort of going down this road. This is like an intermediate stage in which we're both going down this road. And what's scarier to me is what happens if we get all the way to the end of that road, and now we're totally economically independent, then could that lead to war? And it's unclear to me as a sort of geopolitical analyst in a sense. What would then happen? Does it then become really easy to tip over into one side or the other becomes hyper nationalist momentarily and start a war, and then where do we go?
Lockwood: I mean, just thinking back, Anthony, on some of the themes we've covered, and that you cover in the book, it's incredibly complex time for governments and for intelligence agencies to basically have this coherence between, you know, a fragmented global order where you've got decoupling between lots of regions and lots of countries and lots of conflict quite frankly at the moment and there could be more coming quite soon. And on the same time you've got this enormous technological revolution happening with AI and this fourth intelligence revolution that you're talking about in your book. I mean, how does the future look from here if you were heading up one of the intelligence agencies at the moment, perhaps you are, we don't know, but how would you be handling that, the geopolitics side and the tech side, and getting, you know, everyone on board with the same message when it's such a confusing time, quite frankly?
Vinci: We're living through this period of integration where we used to have a stronger separation between politics, military issues versus economic or social issues, and now they're integrating. And the economy has become part of the global political and even military competition, and science and technology has become part of it. And the political side is also looking at the economy, and science and technology as part of what they do, and the military is realizing they need technology to, you know, create weapon systems and to operate. So, everything is sort of integrating now. And for intelligence, they are integrating as well, and one of the things I push in the book that I think is incredibly important is that intelligence needs to follow where the competition goes. And so if I was sitting in the seat as a director of one of these agencies, I'd say, look, this is what the president needs. This is what a general needs. So we need to get better at this, and we need to provide that information to them, because they need to make these decisions. Remember, there is a positive side to intelligence, which is that intelligence keeps you out of wars. A lot of people have this impression that you use intelligence to win a war. Actually, the highest and best use of intelligence is that it keeps you from ever going to war because you make better decisions. You understand the risks. You provide time and space for your decision makers to make better decisions, because they see what's coming down the pike. They see what might happen. And so they can say, okay, here's how we can divert away from going to a war. Here's a decision we can make that will stop this major threat from happening before it ever happens. That's what intelligence officers are there to do. And so we want these agencies to get into these areas of economic or science and technology domains, and integrate it in with political and military thinking so that they can help decision makers make these decisions and ultimately keep us out of war.
Lockwood: So you're arguing for the purest, most holistic definition of the word intelligence. You're calling for intelligence agencies and agents to be intelligent across the board.
Vinci: That's a great way to put it.
Lockwood: Well, Doctor Anthony Vinci, it has been our pleasure to speak to you here on this week's episode of One Decision. Thanks so much for making time. And for more conversations with leading decision makers and thinkers, check out onedecision.com and our YouTube page, where you'll find additional videos, commentaries and explainers. I'm Rosanna Lockwood. Thank you for listening.
