The intelligence community lacks the business knowledge needed to provide Americans with economic security from foreign theft, coercion and competition, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
The officials see gaps in their ability to detect technological surprises and threats to national security emerging in the private sector, where adversaries such as China look to undermine and steal U.S. innovation.
Efforts to remedy the problems include changes to the spy agencies’ structure and new tools created in the private sector that can assist the government in analyzing America’s adversaries.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has created a unit focused on understanding cutting-edge technology applications, risks and supply chains.
Casey Blackburn leads the burgeoning Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technology with what he described as a “panicked sense of urgency.”
“Business acumen, we’re very short on that when it comes to analyzing national security,” Mr. Blackburn said at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI expo in Washington earlier this month.
Mr. Blackburn, a veteran analyst of the CIA, told attendees that his office is working to determine how the intelligence community can measure technology as an instrument of national power when evaluating foreign competitors.
Analysts have more traditionally focused on indicators of military might, natural resources, people, and the health of economies to comprehend and forecast foreign affairs.
Mr. Blackburn said the White House and intelligence community expect his office to identify individual tech capabilities for the government to prioritize, so the U.S. does not fall behind others or lose a competitive advantage.
A major challenge remains finding the right people with the proper training.
Beth Sanner, a CIA alumnus who spent several decades in the intelligence community, said, “We literally do not have the talent pool.”
“We don’t have people who actually understand mergers and acquisition,” Ms. Sanner said at the AI expo.
Ms. Sanner recalled rejecting an employee’s proposal to obtain a graduate degree in a business discipline from an Ivy League school and lamented that she knew she could not have kept the employee from the lure of the private sector anyway. She said the intelligence community needs to work more on how to attract mid-career professionals working outside of the government.
Other efforts to bring business and technology talent into the intelligence community have involved debate over whether to turn the Commerce Department into a spy agency.
The department has responsibility for export controls and foreign investment, and Congress has directed the intelligence community to assess whether to provide enhanced intelligence support to the Commerce Department.
The intelligence community and the Commerce Department already share a close relationship. It includes the sharing of personnel with expertise on such things as emerging technology, supply chain vulnerability, economic intelligence and counterintelligence, as detailed in a major defense bill signed into law by President Biden in December.
Mr. Blackburn declined to comment on efforts to transform the Commerce Department into America’s 19th intelligence agency.
Some private sector products may enable better tracking of U.S. adversaries’ tech and wishlists than the tools the government already uses.
The Commerce Department has faced congressional scrutiny for overwhelmingly approving the transfer of technology to blacklisted companies on the department’s own Entity List, which identifies foreign people and groups under restriction because of national security concerns.
Approximately 800 Chinese entities are blacklisted on various lists, according to Datenna’s Martijn Rasser.
By contrast, Mr. Rasser said his software company tracks 500,000 entities that either have sold to the Chinese military, have registered in a military procurement database, or whose research activity has prompted a defense label in Datenna’s techno-economic intelligence platform.
Mr. Rasser, Datenna’s managing director and a former CIA officer, told The Washington Times his team excels at knowing when and where to grab crucial information from behind China’s firewall, which restricts digital access.
“Could you make a national security case for most of those 500,000 entities being added to the Entity List? Yeah, probably,” Mr. Rasser said on the sidelines of the AI expo.
Mr. Rasser, however, advocated for filtering that massive number down to approximately 2,000 entities that should be focused on right away, to help export control experts become less reactive and more strategic and proactive.
He said Datenna’s platform is focused squarely on China and allows for analysts to hone in on individuals, such as providing a professor’s research history, the funding they received and the projects they spent it on, and whether the professor built a company from the research.
As attendees of the AI expo were evacuated outside due to a purported security threat, Mr. Rasser told The Times that Datenna worked with groups within the State Department but declined to elaborate on any other U.S. government partners. He said Datenna was engaged with other countries as well.
“You don’t have to be a coder, you don’t have to be a data scientist, you don’t need to know a single word in Mandarin to use it,” Mr. Rasser said of Datenna. “You could sit down behind the platform and in five minutes time, you’re off to the races.”
Time is of the essence for the intelligence community to overhaul its work to understand the technological disruptions and economic security threats multiplying worldwide.
Mr. Blackburn estimated that the clock was running down fast for the spy agencies to make fundamental changes or risk falling far behind America’s adversaries.
“If we wait two years or three years or five years to try to figure these things out, we’re going to be another five years behind,” Mr. Blackburn told attendees of the AI expo.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.