The Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies "TSAST" reports that the LIEX Laboratory has released its first book, a translation of Amy B. Zegart's book entitled "Spies, Lies and Algorithms". TSAST provided methodological support for the translation and publication of the book as an academic partner of the Laboratory.
"Her new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, is dedicated to adapting the work of national intelligence to the digital age. The book is based on Zegart's extensive experience, her many years of research into the history of American intelligence services and advising the U.S. government, hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and politicians, and her extensive teaching experience. The uniqueness of "Spies, lies and algorithms" is that it is a concentrate of knowledge about the American intelligence community - all key aspects are covered in a compact edition." - an excerpt from a book review published in the free LIEX Almanac, in the second issue for 2024.
The full text of the review is published below. Have a good read!
The Intelligence Express Laboratory, a Russian research center whose task is to analyze open information related to the activities of intelligence services around the world, has published a Russian translation of Amy Zegart's book "Spies, Lies, and Algorithms" ("Spies, Lies, and Algorithms")
The author of the book is Amy Zegart. Zegart is a prominent American political scientist, recognized by both sides of American politics as an expert. As a student of the disliked "hawk" in Russia, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Republican), she worked on the National Security Council of President Bill Clinton (Democrat), after which she taught and advised politicians of both parties.
Zegart is considered one of the main visionaries of the development of the American national defense system. She is a member of the board of directors of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, one of the most advanced American military industrial companies, a developer of laser weapons and unmanned fighter jets. As a professor at Stanford University, Zegart has developed and teaches the Stanford Cyber Policy Program to American politicians and heads of military-industrial companies.
The reader will be interested in two more aspects of Zegart - she is a leading national expert on the US intelligence community, national security policy and an excellent author who writes in a lively, understandable and modern language. On the topic of the evolution of the US national intelligence system and its current state, Zegart has written several books that have become textbook in the American intelligence community: "Flawed By Design" ("Crookedly done from the very beginning") - about the evolution of relations between the US Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, "Spying Blind" ("Spying Blindly") about the work of the US special services in the period leading up to the September 11 attacks and "Eyes on Spies" ("Keeping an eye on spies") on the shortcomings of the system of civilian oversight of U.S. intelligence. Her new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, is dedicated to adapting the work of national intelligence to the digital age. The book is based on Zegart's extensive experience, her many years of research into the history of American intelligence services and advising the U.S. government, hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and politicians, and her extensive teaching experience. The uniqueness of "Spies, lies and algorithms" is that it is a concentrate of knowledge about the American intelligence community - all key aspects are covered in a compact edition.
Thus, the second chapter of the book begins by considering the lack of knowledge about the real work of intelligence and the associated costs. Not only ordinary people, but also decision-making politicians on both sides of the ocean actually have little idea how intelligence services actually work, and the resulting gap has been filled to a great extent by fiction. Zegart studies how the growing popularity of "spytainment", spy-themed entertainment materials in the form of Tom Clancy novels or Hollywood films affects the expectations of society and politicians from intelligence capabilities and, as a result, the real work of the special services.
The third chapter of the book offers an excellent overview of the history of American intelligence from George Washington's first spies with invisible ink to the present day. It seems to us that the history of America is small, but it is very rich and well documented. Through the view of a great lover of the history of his country, which is Zegart, many new facts are revealed to the reader: from the time of the War of Independence through espionage scandals during World War I and the dashing raids of the Special Operations Directorate during the Second to the formation of the modern US intelligence community system during the Cold War.
The fourth chapter could be boring, because it is devoted to the theoretical foundations of the intelligence community. However, Zegart skillfully presents theory through practice, more precisely, through the example of a decade-long American hunt for Osama bin Laden and the personal reflections of intelligence officers about their daily lives, ethical dilemmas, best and worst moments.
The fifth chapter is titled "Why Analysis is So Difficult: Seven Deadly Biases." In it, Zegart creatively develops the ideas of his compatriot Robert Jervis, who in his book Perception and Misperception in International Politics describes the causes of the key failures of the American intelligence community in terms of cognitive distortions, traps and biases that can lead even the most sophisticated minds astray.. Zegart also anticipates the coming world of artificial intelligence by discussing which types of analysis machines can perform better than humans, and humans are better than machines.
The sixth chapter is devoted to one of the most sensitive issues for the intelligence community: traitors and defectors. What motivates trusted employees to become defectors? How can intelligence officers recruit spies in the digital age and how can they identify possible double agents while maintaining the trust needed to do their job? The chapter also touches on the aspect of information storage in the information age - the last major failure of American intelligence with the disclosure of a spy network in China was initially attributed to the activities of "moles", but a thorough investigation revealed the real reason - flaws in the network architecture of information transmission from agents, which were used by Chinese hackers and counterintelligence agents.
Chapter seven focuses on covert action and what former CIA Director Leon Panetta once called "the difficult business of painful choices." Zegart examines the problem of CIA-organized liquidations in different parts of the world from three positions - a historian, a lawyer and a civic thinker. She analyzes why covert actions are so popular, what is the role of images imposed by Hollywood here, how effective these operations really are and what is the price of failures.
We strongly recommend reading the eighth chapter to anyone interested in modern politics. It seems to relate exclusively to the domestic American cuisine - the congressional oversight system for the activities of American intelligence agencies. However, the reader will find in this chapter an understanding of how and why certain decisions are made in American foreign policy, and will be able to take a fresh look at US policy towards our country. The American experience of civil and party supervision of the activities of special services is unique and is still waiting to be studied and adapted to the Russian system.
The ninth chapter is devoted to one of the key trends of recent decades - the sharp increase in intelligence capabilities in working with open sources (OSINT). Thanks to the Internet, commercial satellites and automated analytics, intelligence is no longer a monopoly of superpower governments. Now, non-governmental organizations and even private individuals are often faster and more effective than professional intelligence services. This new reality of OSINT's broad network intelligence largely defines the landscape of modern intelligence work. Zegart writes that modern state intelligence needs to positively incorporate and gently direct numerous new intelligence actors - non-governmental centers, the media and private researchers.
The tenth chapter is devoted to the key challenge for intelligence agencies in the 21st century - cyber threats and the potential for their use for intelligence purposes. Cyber threats are now hacking both machines and minds: AI creates deepfake videos, audio and photographs so real that their unreliability cannot be quickly identified. No set of threats has changed so quickly or demanded so much from intelligence. In many ways, cyberspace is an ideal battlefield for the knights of the cloak and dagger, where deception, tricks and advanced technologies are used for theft, espionage, information warfare and where knowledge and technologies relevant yesterday are outdated today.
The book "Spies, Lies and Algorithms" is a wonderful immersion into the life of the American intelligence community and an excellent read for anyone who is trying to understand how modern intelligence adapts to the conditions of the digital age. We recommend that all those who want to understand how the American national security system works, how cognitive distortions affect decision-making at the highest level, and think about what to do with all this in the rapidly changing world of networks, deepfakes, bots and artificial intelligence.
