Everybody grab their seats.
Everybody what?
Oh yeah, no, I'll wait.
Okay, I'll now tell you lots of secrets.
But you have to tell me which secrets.
See, I can't tell you the secret until you tell me which secret you need to know.
What I'm doing here, there's this...
There's this Californian, Paul Hoffman, lives in his car.
Lives in his car.
Paul Hoffman killed Kennedy, right.
But this is the whole earth, no advertising.
No advertising, this is the whole earth.
And if you send him a contribution, he'll send you a roll of these.
And it's just the neatest sticker I've ever seen.
And so I've got a bunch up here that anybody can come up and grab some later.
Okay, I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself.
So that you have a basis for judging whether I know anything about spying.
I'll do that in just two or three minutes.
And then I really, I have things that I know I want to communicate, but I'd much rather kind of get a feel from you guys of what you really want to know.
I spent my whole life overseas as the son of an oil man.
Ten years in Asia, including four years in Vietnam at the height of the combat period.
Where as a twelve year old I was trading cigarettes for bullets and bloody shit.
Which my mother made me put disinfectant on.
Ten years in Latin America, got a graduate degree in international relations with a thesis on predicting revolution.
Get the fuck off now.
I will not fucking chill.
That is a screen not to play computer games on.
Not to project the speaker.
So get the fuck out now.
No hacking.
Yes, I would like you to switch it back to the mode it was in.
Okay, so thesis on predicting revolution, but I really decided I'd become much, much too intellectual.
So I joined the United States Marine Corps.
And this had the desired effect of re-stabilizing my balance.
I was an infantry officer, but I found infantry duty very boring.
So I joined the Central Intelligence Agency.
I did three back-to-back tours as a clandestine case officer.
Which is recruiting traitors.
Don't ever call a CIA officer an agent.
Agents are traitors.
Case officers are the guys that work for their country and recruit traitors.
And I did very well.
Five times the regional recruiting average.
But I had some problems with what I perceived to be the false and deceptive nature of what we were doing.
Don't get me wrong, I think recruiting traitors when you need them is cool.
But recruiting traitors in a very incompetent way and pretending that the local service doesn't know you've recruited them, this is not cool.
Because it basically means you're living a lie to your own government.
So I then went over and helped program satellites.
These 30 billion dollar monsters that collect all kinds of shit.
And yes, we can talk about Echelon.
And I helped steal signals code books from other countries.
I'm pretty familiar with what we can do in signals imagery.
There's another discipline called Measurements and Signatures Intelligence.
Which is really cool.
It's like smelling shit in the air from a long way away.
And I've done all the belt buckle stuff and hidden cameras and all that jazz, walking through walls.
And I kind of got bored with all that and the Marine Corps asked me to come stand up a new intelligence center.
So I spent 20 million dollars of your money to figure out that 99% of what I needed to produce intelligence, which is useful actionable information, was not secret.
Not available from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Not in English and not in this country.
This really fucked me up.
And so I spent the next 10 years coming to grips with this.
I've spent the last 10 years as CEO of what's called a lifestyle company.
Meaning it can afford to keep me in visiting conferences like this, but not much else.
And I've spent the last 10 years trying to teach governments how to use private sector knowledge that they've cut themselves off from, literally.
Our spies are in a cement bunker and they think that the only shit that matters is stuff they steal.
Well, we're spending 30 billion dollars a year stealing 10% of what we need to know.
And we've completely cut ourselves off from the 90% of the information that's actually useful.
And so I've just published a book.
It's called On Intelligence, Spies and Secrecy in an Open World.
And if you really, really want to toy with the Amazon ranks, everybody buy it tomorrow.
I went to rank 902 on Amazon.com based on 88 people buying it on the same day.
This was great.
I managed to catch it and I've printed it out and of course I'll never see that rank again unless you all buy my book tomorrow.
In which case I could compete with Harry Potter.
That would be a good hack.
Thank you very much.
I get no money for the book.
This was a labor of love.
I sold my soul to the small publisher.
Actually, I didn't.
I did a book from nothing to published and ranked 902 on Amazon.com in four months.
It took me two months to write it and two months to get it published and that's pretty fast.
But all the money goes to the publisher but I'd like to see it out there and that kind of leads me to what I thought I might do here when Emanuel and I talked about me doing something up here.
We have a dumb nation.
I was very, very moved by the keynote speaker.
In fact, he really depressed me a lot.
I'm familiar with Norm Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and the literature.
That's wonderful, wonderful work.
But I had forgotten how bad it is.
And in fact, the keynote speaker today changed what my next book will be about.
Because what we really need to talk about is how do you create a smart nation?
How do you create a nation that harnesses the distributed intelligence of the whole earth?
How do you create a nation that makes informed decisions at local, state, national and global levels?
The only really decent idea I've had in the last year is I suddenly realized that global intelligence, global coverage of all things that are happening that matters is unaffordable and unachievable by any single nation.
You actually need to go back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the NUOSphere, H.G.
Wells, World Brain, my own implementation of these ideas, which is a virtual intelligence community.
Where guess what?
Intelligence is not secret.
I distinguish between data, information and intelligence.
Data is the print, the image, the signal, whatever.
Information is data that has been collated and is of generic interest and is broadcast.
New York Times is information.
So is all of the so-called intelligence that we publish.
Intelligence, rather than information, is information that has been discovered, discriminated, distilled and delivered to answer a really serious question.
And it's actionable.
Alright, so we have someone who's buying land in a foreign country soon.
They have an intelligence question, which is who in this country can fuck me up?
That's a really important question.
So we need to know who's the power structure, not just the power structure in country, but the power structure that would be elected if there was a changeover, the church power structure, the mestizo Indian power structure, the drug runner power structure.
It would be real helpful to know that there's a cocaine lab right on the border of the land you're about to buy.
Because it may be bombed and they may miss.
So this is other cool shit.
Anyway, let me stop at that point and just say I've done all of this stuff.
And I would be happy, speaking spontaneously, to answer any questions you may have.
And I can't see all of you.
Is anyone still there?
So let's just have a little chaos.
Somebody shout out a question and I'll see how it goes with three or four questions.
And then I may or may not go back into some prepared remarks and whatever.
Yeah, all right.
Echelon.
You know, you must be French.
They're really...
Europe is really into this.
A little while ago, Australia and New Zealand were a little concerned because the New Zealand prime minister discovered that the New Zealand intelligence service, A, did not tell him when they agreed to sell their soul to the Americans.
And B, the New Zealanders had no idea what the Americans were doing with all the computers that New Zealand had paid for.
Echelon is not a program I have been directly involved with, but I can tell you as someone who knows the bureaucracy very well and knows where we've been, Echelon is 1970s technology.
Okay?
That's number one.
Number two, I can tell you for absolute sure that we process less than 6% of the signals we collect on the Soviet Union and probably less than 1% of the signals that we collect on everybody else.
All right?
We have over-invested in old collection technology.
We haven't invested anything in processing.
We still don't understand heterogeneous database search and retrieval.
We still don't do clustering, weighting, data visualization, and geospatial correlation of data at the CIA.
All right?
It is really, really ugly.
Believe me on this.
Graduate students get to CIA and although it's getting a little bit better now, you need to understand that in 1988 CIA made a fundamentally stupid decision.
They decided to go with the secretly neurotic architecture and the PS2.
In 1988.
Can you believe this?
Fuck.
So, Echelon is, you know, typical of the American bureaucracy.
We are in trouble in part because we have built ourselves a bureaucracy based on old technology.
And we have cut ourselves off from all you smart people.
So, DARPA, to take one unrelated example, spent $70 million on data visualization stuff that Hollywood had abandoned five years previously.
We literally have no clue what's going on in critical technologies around the world with some isolated examples.
Yes, we have the national labs.
Yes, CIA.
I worked, by the way, in the office.
I was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group for the U.S.
intelligence community.
My chief technical officer, Dr.
Michael Levitt, was the agency architect and senior information scientist for CIA until two years ago.
So, I think we know where off we speak.
In your darkest nightmares about American intelligence, I am sure none of you ever conceived of the possibility that rather than being intrusive, they are stupid.
This is scary.
Okay.
Does that answer the Echelon question?
Okay.
Yes, sir.
And then here.
Okay.
Let me go with CIA first.
Thank you.
The question is, does this thing work?
I guess it's not.
I'll repeat the question.
The question was, how much domestic CIA spying takes place?
And also NSA.
A couple of quick thoughts on this.
Number one, CIA has an entire division called the National Collection Division.
These are CIA officers with CIA credentials who approach corporations, generally for two reasons.
First, to find non-official cover positions that can be used overseas.
And second, to obtain information from these corporations that's helpful to American interest.
Sometimes proprietary information.
Let me give you an example.
During the Gulf War, we creamed Saddam Hussein's C3I system because we were able to get from some of the people who created the telecommunications stuff, information about what was actually there and how to hit it and stuff like that.
That was a real success story.
A lot of it came from CIA people overseas that got it from West German companies that do a lot of work in Iraq.
So my answer to you is that CIA does not, to the best of my knowledge, spy on anyone in the United States.
Now we go to NSA.
Now you've got to understand, remember, if in doubt between conspiracy and ignorance, always go with ignorance.
NSA listens, obviously, when you're doing digital, when you're doing eavesdropping, you can't distinguish where the signal originated from and so on.
So NSA will indeed pick up a lot of stuff from the United States that's going in and out.
But there is an executive order, 12333, which lays down the rules.
They do violate these rules, they violated it in my case.
I was interviewed by a tabloid newspaper, which is given out free at supermarkets in Israel, and I was talking about how it could take down the country in 48 hours with 10 good people.
Israel.
It doesn't matter which country, actually.
But these assholes sent, the CIA, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, sent a report over to the White House that had my name in it.
That's illegal.
U.S.
citizens, unless they are known to be an agent of a foreign power, or suspected strongly to be an agent of a foreign power, are absolutely not supposed to appear by name in any message, nor are they supposed to store information about U.S.
citizens.
in their files.
In my case, obviously, they violated the rules, and at the time I was too dumb to sue their ass, because it would have been a quick million.
Maybe not, but the point is they violated their own regulations.
Now, everyone working overseas is assumed to be a non-U.S.
citizen, or any transmissions that are intercepted from overseas are assumed to be non-U.S.
in nature, unless there is context and text in the message that makes it clear it's a U.S.
citizen, then the executive order applies.
In the United States, the reverse is true.
Every signal intercepted that appears to originate or have someone involved in the United States is assumed to be a U.S.
citizen, until the contrary is known.
So, I would give them high marks for following this.
I think, by and large, the U.S.
intelligence community is a bureaucracy rather than an intrusive conspiracy, if you will.
And they have a real problem because their technology is worse than yours.
In fact, their technology is worse than the druggies.
I mean, the Colombian drug lords have better computers, better airplanes, more real estate, more people working as informers.
I mean, every Coast Guard platform that moves in air, land, and sea is being followed.
I mean, they know where all our shit is.
And they let us have 1% of the take every year, and they get all the rest in here.
We are absolutely clueless on how to fight the drug war, and I've heard reasonable comments about how to make this go away.
Yes, there was a question over here.
Los Alamos, you know, a lot of people don't realize that the national labs are actually run by private sector companies.
And they are bureaucracies once removed.
And I do have an important comment about security.
Which is, when your best employees violate the rules, it's time to change the rules.
Our security bureaucracy has become so incredibly pedestrian and intrusive and annoying that people are refusing to work for the intelligence community because the background investigations and the polygraphs and so on take 18 months or just a real royal pain in the ass.
And then they pay you like shit and give you bad working conditions and don't give you the tools you really need to do the job.
So the security things at Los Alamos are the tip of the iceberg.
In fact, when State Department lost its laptop computer, there was a frantic effort over at all the other national intelligence agencies to account for theirs, and they couldn't.
There's a shitload of laptops missing at CIA.
They don't know where they are.
Now the good news is there's nothing on them because most people over there don't get laptops.
But it's really not pretty.
Another question.
There and then here and then there.
Over there first.
Sure.
It's classified.
How do you walk through a wall?
Well, basically you walk through a wall by pretending you have a key to the door and getting through all the alarm systems and being on the other side.
So you're talking about several technologies.
You're talking about lockpicking technology, and we have a master lockpicker here.
You're talking about alarm technology.
Now digital alarms are making it a lot harder.
It's really getting serious.
You also have technology to open safes.
And you should literally be able to tell what the combination is without knowing it in advance.
And there are some really, really good things.
They are, however, dangerous.
You might radiate for a while when you use this stuff.
Anything that doesn't have at least two live human beings, one of them ideally remote from the site itself, is vulnerable to penetration.
I'll tell you two funny stories.
One is we did something really, really complicated, got all the way in, and there was nothing in there.
And as we're going out the door, someone thought to look under the code clerk's pillow, and there it was.
It was great.
Another time, and this wasn't me, this was someone else, but they darted a dog.
They put a dart into a dog to put him to sleep, and they went in and they did some really, really sophisticated stuff.
They backed all the way out.
They're listening to the audio the next morning, and the woman is screaming, someone's killed the dog.
Well, the dart was missing.
The dart was still in the dead dog.
The dog had crawled under the Volkswagen and died.
And so they're having a panic attack, because we're talking about 18 months' worth of work, millions of dollars going down the drain.
If they find the dart, they realize they've been compromised.
She wanted autopsies, but those were expensive.
So finally, they just buried the dog, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
But ever since then, this major friendly country, the United States, has told all of its people, whatever you do, don't kill the fucking dog.
There's a similar story on the Soviet side.
It's told by Oleg Kalugin, who's now a green card resident in the United States.
The wife of the senior military intelligence officer in New Delhi fell in love with her German shepherd.
And this posed a security problem for them.
So they go all the way back to the Soviet Union, and finally gets up to Andropov.
And he's nodding his head, and finally says, kill the dog.
So, this is a good Soviet solution.
You don't want her sleeping with the dog, kill the dog.
So they go, and they order up another batch of this poison that they used in London with the umbrella to kill this guy.
And so they go out, and they umbrella the dog.
But, they made a mistake.
They didn't kill the dog, but he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Awesome!
I had 20 Australian officers in tears on the floor over this one.
Over here, sir.
Yes, it is.
Bill Colby, a former director of Central Intelligence, speaking at one of my conferences, said in 1996, I think it was, that the NRO could see a grapefruit.
Okay, it's four inches wide.
Problem is, you have to tell them where to look for it.
They can't find the goddamn grapefruit in the first place.
And so, we have a real problem with overhead technology, because in the 70s and 80s, when we were transitioning from the U-2s to overhead satellites, we had two satellite constellations planned.
One was for wide area surveillance, to be able to look at large swaths of ground and then hone in on things and kind of figure out where stuff was.
And then the other one was the precision thing.
There's a wonderful Washington Post article, by the way, on spy satellite technology and how Hollywood differs from the reality.
There's a book out on spy satellites that's very, very good.
I just do a search on Amazon.com for spy satellites and you'll find what I think is probably a very decent book.
What's the issue here?
During the Gulf War, we could not find Scud missiles.
I mean, we're spending $30 billion on all this shit and we can't find an 18-wheeler?
You know, in a desert?
There's something wrong with our system.
So, I will tell you, and Locke Johnson, who was on both the Church and the Aspen Brown Commissions, will tell you, we have spent way too much money on narrowly focused overhead collection systems.
We've spent no money on processing multimedia, multilingual information in a way that makes it useful to a human being.
And we've spent almost no money on smart people that know something.
I mean, your average analyst is right out of college, paid dirt.
Okay, we're talking GS-7, 8, and 9, which is like second lieutenant's pay.
They will, over time, over a 20-year career, rise, if they're lucky, to GS-14, which is like a lieutenant colonel, $65,000, $75,000.
You guys can earn that tomorrow, if you're not already.
Very bad pay.
We haven't figured out that in the age of information, you've got to pay a lot of money for a few really smart people, and you don't need the clerks.
Here's another true story.
I was responsible for offensive counterintelligence, and so I asked for a list.
Offensive counterintelligence means penetrate the other guy so you can find out if they've penetrated you.
And so I asked for a list of everyone that we knew who worked for this denied area country.
And they came back with a list of 200 names.
I said, this is bullshit.
I reported more names than this from prisoner interrogations in Central America.
And so, after many, many efforts of trying to get the data out of the CIA computers, I finally hired a retired CIA person, and she spent three months going through all of the files.
And at the end of that period, we had 3,000 names.
So then I said, alright, why?
Because when you do a message and you have a lot of names in it, at the end you say index all names, which means every single name in this old-fashioned system is supposed to be indexed.
Turns out, the people who do the index are GS2 clerks in the basement with no education.
And so when a message comes in with a prisoner or defector debriefing that has 300 names, shit!
And it moves on.
No indexing.
When in doubt, it's not a conspiracy.
FBI has the same problem.
Over here.
Am I distracting you?
Is this obsessive-compulsive behavior?
I'll tell you, I love this.
Paul Hoffman is just a wonderful human being, and I think he did more good for the Earth with this sticker than anyone I know.
I hope you guys... what?
It's an Apollo 17 shot, and on the back, and I ask you all to just take one of these, on the back are the EarthSeals PO box.
And if you just send them like $10, they'll send you a roll of $1,000.
It's absolutely the best bargain that I know of for this kind of thing.
You had a question.
I will now manipulate my bottle here.
Radar mapping of the surface, okay.
Get me started on NEMA.
You guys haven't seen a rave until I start talking about NEMA.
I love General King, he's a fine man.
And it's not his fault.
NEMA is so fucked up, because they don't have any satellites.
Alright, when we decided, this goes back to your question sir, when we decided to build satellites, we knew that we needed a wide area surveillance satellite that could do two shots, and we could get to contour lines and all this other cool shit, and then we needed something really narrow so we could read license plates.
Well, we cancelled the wide area surveillance one, right?
So, think about this.
You have satellites that can take postage stamp sized pictures of the whole earth.
One at a time.
Taking maybe a thousand years to do the whole earth.
And then, let's say you get most of those postage stamps, you're now trying to create a map image out of a mosaic of postage stamps taken over the course of many years, at different times of day, during different seasons, from different angles of looks,
with different kinds of cloud cover.
You're fucked.
This is where NEMA is today.
Now, the good news is, radar has come a long way.
Canadian Radarsat is excellent.
They advertise 8 meter, that's the best they can do.
Their average is actually 25 meters resolution.
The best today is space imaging, but no one can afford it.
The best in the world in terms of an industrial system, thank you sir, with 17 ground stations and very fine 10 meter resolution is the French.
But, the Department of Defense has this real hard on about buying stuff from the French.
So, they won't do it.
They'd rather be ignorant.
So, when we go to Burundi or Somalia, we don't have maps.
So, we end up having to do things.
They finally figured out they could buy maps from the Russian military.
The Russian military does have maps of the third world.
Very good maps.
They had the Italian cable car on their map.
Sorry, they probably also had the Chinese embassy on their map.
I've heard two stories on the Chinese embassy.
The first is that we just fucked up and missed because the embassy had moved and we didn't talk to anybody who was there.
The second story I've heard is that China was running all of the Chinese intel ops in the region out of that embassy.
And it was deliberate.
My understanding of bureaucracy is such that I'm inclined to believe the former rather than the latter explanation.
I'll tell you something.
I'm alive today because we don't kill each other.
There are lots of times I could have been killed by the KGB or extreme leftists or extreme rightists.
I mean, there are a lot of people that like to kill.
But we have an unwritten code that we don't kill each other.
We don't kidnap each other.
Except in very, very rare occasions.
And the guy that got kidnapped in Beirut was one of those.
But by and large, we leave each other alone and we pretend that we're doing serious intelligence.
Andy.
The NATO...
That's not one I'm familiar with, Andy.
This is Andy Mullermagen from Germany, Chaos Club.
You know him.
We became rock
stars.
Did it close down?
Okay.
I'll talk about recruiting, spotting, assessing, recruiting, handling, and terminating agents.
But first, I do want to mention that we have a shuttle mission, which may or may not have happened, which was supposed to do the whole earth at radar resolutions down below one meter.
And that's great.
If and when it does happen, that's a treasure trove of data, which of course they're going to lock up in Washington rather than releasing to the public.
This is very stupid.
But what they don't have are the imageries.
And I have in my book and other places said that we need no less than $500 million a year in commercial imagery procurement to marry up.
This is how you build a map.
First, you do your wide area surveillance.
Then you add the precision points to orthorectify the map.
Then you go get the Russian military maps because they have decades worth of data extraction, which is different from looking at an image.
You overlay the Russian data on the map, verify it to the extent that you need to.
Then you go buy the tourist map.
Nima's budget is being increased this year by $2.98.
Okay.
Cheap shot, I'm sorry.
I have more of those.
And then, oh yes, same thing, Grenada.
See, we were stupid.
Grenada.
Then after you've bought the $2.98 tourist map and just look for some basic stuff, then you ask somebody who's actually been there.
We had defense attachés that had visited the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
The Russians had just done in 1997 a 1 to 10 upgrade of the map.
Their official military map, 1 to 10,000.
That's a very, very good map.
Okay, now going back to Andy's thought.
We go through the motions.
First off, the classic CIA station consists of a bunch of puppies that throw money around like it's going out of style.
So they're really easy to spot.
And they recruit people they meet at cocktail parties.
They don't recruit people that operate cranes and do other useful things in the infrastructure.
That's down in the gutter.
That's beneath real case officers.
So, Andy, when we talk about a sleeper network, we probably had 100 or 250 people, many of whom may have died without us noticing.
There's someone doing wild and lascivious things back there.
Okay.
I don't care.
So you go out to someone, you recruit them, maybe you give them a retainer, let's say in the order of $5,000 a year.
And then you have legal work, you've done background checks on them.
Okay, so they're kind of all out there.
When you deactivate them, you can do it right or you can do it wrong.
If you do it right, you go to them and say we're deactivating you, but here's a year's annual salary for your trouble and tell no one.
Or you can fuck them and just forget them.
We did that with a Soviet defector that just sued the CIA and won a bunch of money.
Let me tell you what's going to happen.
The Washington Post article on CIA fucking that defector is going to be in every Soviet lunchroom.
Okay, by the end of next week, we've just kissed away our chance to do serious Soviet recruitments for a while.
Because they're not going to trust us.
Because we didn't treat this guy right.
And why didn't we treat this right?
It comes back to security blockheads.
Real case officers don't do babysitting.
So what happens?
We bring them back into Washington, we turn them over to the lowest common denominator in the intelligence community, the security thug.
Okay, who probably doesn't have a college degree, may have a college degree, but by and large is someone who walks around and checks to see if safes are open or closed.
Okay, and this guy is handling a highly volatile defector who has got emotional angst like you can't imagine.
And then we're saying we're not going to give you money, we're not going to live up to all of our promises.
There's a book in my, by the way, the annotated bibliography in my book is the best part of the book.
And there's one book in there called Traitor.
It's about a Soviet case officer that was basically brought back to the United States and thrown out on the street.
He ended up being a wild ass drunk, which Soviets are to begin with.
I mean, he went California on the Soviet side.
And he ends up taking a little motel school course, you know, one of these hundred dollar courses that will make you a millionaire.
And finally he climbed out of it, but you can't treat people like that.
We had a good talk here earlier about ethics.
The ethics of the intelligence community has lost sight of the value of human beings.
It has lost sight of the importance of treating people with enormous respect and giving them the tools that they deserve and giving them all of these things.
So my bottom line answer to you, Andy, is that a third of those people died and we don't know that yet.
A third of them were probably terminated in some way, shape, or form.
And a third of them are still there waiting for the call and will never hear from us.
Now, do you want to say anything?
What do you think happened?
That could be.
I have to tell you, I mean, there are outfits like executive outcomes and there are people who like to do mercenary shit.
My experience is that we're really crummy at setting up stay-behind networks.
And I'll give you some specific examples.
The reason the U-2 was invented was not because CIA was really smart and thought about doing a cool technology hack.
It's because everybody they sent into the Soviet Union was being shot on arrival.
Okay, now why were they being shot on arrival?
They were being shot on arrival because CIA was doing all of its recruiting out of the Soviet emigre groups in London.
Well, guess what?
The KGB and the GRU were all over those groups.
They knew within 24 hours when we had approached or pitched somebody.
And we'd go through a year of training and really do it right.
I mean, one of the few places in the world where we really do decent, proper, sophisticated clandestine intelligence is Russia, China, and New Delhi.
And we're good at it when we do it right.
So we spend a year training these guys up not realizing they already know who they are.
We train all of our CIA case officers at Camp Perry in Williamsburg.
And we're clueless to the fact that the Soviets are taking pictures of all of their license plates as they're driving to and from camp.
I mean, you want to be a real spy, you should go to randomly selected military bases all over the country and be flown into training into the so-called clandestine airfield.
And flown back out, you should do your training in alias.
I had all the names of all my classmates.
We're a bureaucracy.
We're not a spy service anymore.
And I have to tell you, when I'm done with open source, I want to go build a clandestine service the French can't find.
One, two, and then three.
Yes, sir?
Well, let's deconstruct that in several ways.
First off, you're right.
But, when you come into the intelligence community, you do this long enormous background check and then you're cleared for SITK code word by and large.
Now, there are a few code word compartments that you then have to go through further loops.
But the prevailing assumption is that once you're in, you're cleared for everything and everything is classified SITK code word.
It's not different classifications for different sections and things like that.
Now, in this digital age, we've gotten to the point where you can, in fact, make sure that people are only reading what they're supposed to be reading.
And you should be able to see patterns in reading that is not appropriate.
We still don't do that.
We still publish a lot of stuff in hard copy.
Now, the black compartments.
There are clearly certain capabilities we have that I couldn't talk about here.
And, by the way, don't confuse me with some renegade or somebody who's going to give you secrets that you shouldn't have.
That's not going to happen tonight.
I'll tell you about dead dogs.
But, I love the government.
I think the government has an important role to play in what we do, but I want it to be smart about the way it does it.
So, what I'm about is fixing the government so that it does a better job for you.
I'm not about overturning or exposing, like Phil Agee did, valid operations.
So, well, thank you.
I like being here.
You guys make me think.
So, black compartments.
Yes, you get down to a point where you've actually got a list of 10,000 people who are authorized to see something.
And you have an extremely odious bureaucracy.
One of the problems with black compartments is that each compartment gets to set up its own security.
So, the corporations that are executing those things get down to the ludicrous point of having to have different sensitive compartmented facilities, and different safes, and different offices, and different desks for the same people working on three different compartments.
Three offices, one person, three compartments.
What's wrong with this picture?
Okay, it's really expensive.
So, there are some real handicaps to the compartmented thing.
The other problem is, if you think about it, what does secrecy really do in the defense and intelligence contracting business?
It gives a lifetime monopoly to the person who built the system in the first place.
What does that mean?
That means that all these smart people out in Sunnyvale, who have vastly better ways to do some of this stuff that we're doing in old technology and through compartments and stuff, don't know about our problems because our problems are classified.
When there is a deficiency in the system, that's classified.
If anything, it's even more classified than the system itself.
Okay, so what we've just done is we've just cut ourselves off from fixes, because the people who built it in the first place have their specific paradigm or bias or whatever, and they're not going to go do out-of-the-box solutions, and so it's a problem.
Yes, we can keep a secret, but in the larger scheme of things, the value of information expands based on its utility to others and its sharing and stuff.
But for a spy, a secret shared is a secret lost forever.
And so they have this very anal approach to information, and they don't focus on the fact also that that compartmented information is operating in a vacuum.
Because we don't have... I spent 20 million of your dollars to learn that most of what I needed wasn't available from the system.
That's still true today.
The Aspen Brown Commission, to which I testified, and I'll tell you about the Brundy exercise if no one asks at the end of the day, said, intelligence community access to open source is severely deficient, should be a top priority for funding, should be a top priority for DCI attention,
and it's not.
I mean, George Tenet, the DCI, I know him, and I sent him a copy of my book because I wanted to make sure that he had it, and I signed it, from your evil twin Skippy.
You know, or so one would think.
Because George and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of intelligence.
And that's not a slam on George, he's a good guy.
But he thinks he's in the business of collecting secrets.
I think he's in the business of informing the fucking president.
And most of the time, that's not going to be secret.
It's going to be stuff like historical and contextual understanding, so that you know that neither the Albanians nor the Serbs are good guys.
They're both bad.
And they're going to continue to kill each other for the next hundred years.
And the Croatians, you know, and Montenegro.
I've got two guys that follow genocide worldwide every day.
Do you know that there are 18 genocidal campaigns going on today?
There are 18 distinct minority groups being holocausted out of existence, and I'm not talking hundreds, I'm talking tens of thousands in some cases, hundreds of thousands in some cases, and millions in about four cases.
And there are another 16 countries that are contemplating genocidal campaigns on their minorities.
This is serious shit.
And the reason that the keynote speaker today really resonated with me was because I was thinking about genocide as he was speaking, and I was thinking to myself, you know, goddammit, this is what should be on the front page of the New York Times, not Monica Lewinsky's DNA sample.
The New York Times is not here, so I'm speaking to no result.
Probably because John Markoff knows that he'd be peed on if he came here, and they don't have anybody else.
Why isn't the New York Times here, but why aren't those stories?
You know, I came here, I suppose I'm conservative, I thought I was a Republican who voted Democratic on many occasions, and I discovered that I'm actually a Libertarian.
I love that!
That little thing that was said out there was really cool, that was worth my time.
And I realized that we really don't understand ourselves.
We don't know what we are, because we're not thinking about these things, we're not making informed choices, we're not asking hard questions, we're not voting with our consumer dollars, we don't know about sweatshops and all these other things, we don't know the actual cost of doing business,
and this goes back to the external diseconomies thing.
We need to have a smart nation, where everybody that is spending a dollar knows what that dollar is buying.
And they know what were the ingredients that went in and made up that thing, and so on.
Question over here?
Yes, sir?
I can see the tattoo under your shirt.
I believe that there is extraterrestrial intelligence, and it's not at CIA.
I believe that remote viewing may be possible under some circumstances, particularly if extraterrestrial intelligence is involved.
I have heard from very credible army colonels, that there is enough there so that it should not be mocked.
I'm somewhat skeptical that it actually did work, and that we actually got anywhere with it.
I do believe, I mean hell, maybe I'll become Buddhist and do reincarnations.
I know my wife's parents came back as butterflies in our garden.
But I don't know.
But I have to believe that there is some kind of cosmic connectivity, MEMS and all of this stuff.
And so I'm not going to mock that stuff.
And I'm going to hope that the day comes when our children see some kind of noosphere and cosmic learning.
I mean one of the biggest problems we have in the intelligence community is we don't remember anything.
Think about this for a minute.
You have people on two year tours.
You have files that are on low, what we call low burn time.
Which means if the embassy has taken over because we haven't done our job, then we don't want them to find anything.
So what you have is puppies coming in and out of town, handling agents who sold the same shit three years ago to the predecessor case officer.
And I've never met an agent who will admit that they don't know something.
So they'll say, oh yeah, I got a third cousin that works in the foreign ministry.
I'll get that information for you.
And then they'll go read their newspaper, which our case officer generally is not reading.
And they'll concoct something up and back, up it goes.
W and Intel, Orcon, no foreign, no contract, top secret code word.
And nobody's checking this shit.
I mean, by and large, there's a real quality control issue.
There's a real issue with...
I did my second graduate thesis on strategic and tactical information management for national security.
And what I did was I looked at three embassies.
This is kind of far-fetched, but I'm using your questions to stimulate broader remarks.
I looked at three embassies and what we collect and how we collect it.
And I came to the conclusion that we collect less than 10% of the local knowledge that is available.
Now, if you want to send that information back electronically, you have to staff the message around the embassy and it has to get coordinated by a whole bunch of people.
On the other hand, if you want to send it back in hard copy, you just put it in the pouch and it goes back to your desk officer and no problem.
What does that really mean?
It means that we send most of our stuff back in hard copy, which means that 80% of it becomes unusable to the rest of the government.
Because it's going back into a little shoebox, rather than into an electronic medium that can be shared.
So we're collecting less than 10% of what's overseas.
We're shipping 80% of that 10% back to Washington in shoebox mode, which means Washington is operating on 2% of the available information.
And that's my informed judgment.
Now, why is that?
The only people in embassies that have the money with which to buy local knowledge are the spies.
And they require that you commit treason and agree to a secret relationship as part of taking their money.
We're literally cutting ourselves off from the world.
We have no vehicle for linking chambers of commerce and general managers of American companies, indeed general managers of all companies, to do ongoing living document risk assessments.
The Asian financial meltdown was not predicted by anybody.
It caught everybody by surprise, including the Australians.
Unless I'm wrong.
I heard a speech by the Australian chief economist for one of their major banks, and we asked him, why did you guys not see the Asian problems coming?
And he said, for three reasons.
One, Asian countries don't have really good financial reporting streams.
Two, the governments do a lousy job of getting that out.
And three, it was below our pain threshold.
It wasn't important to us to actually have an overt network of human people who were looking for warning signals and could kind of sound the alarm, and then you surge up and take a closer look and stuff.
So by and large, we are muddling through our responsibility as a great nation.
And that's domestically as well.
I mean, we should be freaking out over vanishing aquifers right now.
Here in the United States, Las Vegas is going to burp one day and run out of water.
And it's going to be a national crisis.
In the back there, both of you, one after the other.
You first and then the next person.
And then over here, number three.
I'm sorry, we'll get to you, but you've asked a question.
One, two, and three, and just go ahead and ask the question in that order.
I agree with the keynote speaker today that North Korea is not a serious threat in the larger scheme of things.
But I do not underestimate for a minute the ability of North Korea to put a nuclear car bomb in New York and detonate it without thinking through the consequences.
Nobody predicted that the Saudis would assault the Israelis and know that they were going to lose because they said no rational person would do that.
We failed to predict the India-Pakistani nuclear bake-off because our analysts said, oh, these guys are all saying we're going to lock and load our nukes and we're going to explode a nuke.
They can't be serious.
Well, they were.
Okay, so that's called mirror imaging.
Americans are real good at counting tanks.
They're really, really shitty at understanding deep-seated beliefs of others.
We just don't do this well.
It's very arrogant of us.
I have an article coming out on presidential intelligence and I'm really trying to come to grips with it.
Well, not really, and I'll tell you why.
Because presidential intelligence properly done relies on what you know.
But right now the president is literally cut off from private sector knowledge.
The U.S.
Institute for Peace had me do a paper for one of their conferences on virtual diplomacy and my theme was there is a growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge.
And this is a very dangerous gap.
And the American intelligence community is not part of the solution today.
And I want it to be part of the solution.
I want American intelligence to be the smartest people that money can buy.
And what does that mean?
It means not hiring college kids.
It means you don't get to handle code word shit until you've spent ten years in the private sector and you've proved through citation analysis and awards and other things that you're one of the top ten Americans or top ten people in the world.
One of the top three Americans on your specific subject and then we'll let you play with secrets.
Well, that costs money because you've got to pay people like that $100,000 or $75,000 depending if they're academic.
But the point is that's a lot more money than $45,000 for a starting puppy.
Andy, I agree with you but that's too much for me to sell in Washington right now.
I think that in the next ten years we will see my vision.
And my vision basically would create a Director General of National Intelligence who would have oversight authority over two intelligence communities.
A secret intelligence community that focuses very narrowly on secrets and a public intelligence community that is wide open and is doing stuff that is of value to business and is harnessing the academics and so on.
And then the National Intelligence Council will move up to the White House level rather than be down locked in bed with the spies.
And they will then be able to deal freely with everybody.
And out of that, Cold Fusion, I talked about that, the intel chapters, all kinds of really good important stuff that we could do.
The other thing that troubles me is we're not looking...
there's a presidential decision, PDD 35, in which it's decided that Russia, China, and Indian Pakistan are important and everything else is not.
Okay, well that's a problem.
It's a problem because AIDS just got elevated.
They finally figured out AIDS is a problem.
Now I'll give CIA credit, they were saying AIDS was a problem 10 years ago.
And you look at the contrast between South Africa and Thailand.
South Africa is really messed up.
Thailand got it under control and has kept the curve line really low.
That should have been a major national issue.
Because diseases like that, the Finns right now have a major AIDS problem because their Finnish peacekeepers and UN forces brought AIDS home.
Okay , AIDS is now global.
In a very true and real sense.
And so we need to give that more of a priority.
Another question back there, hang on, we'll go back there.
I need water that's uncontaminated.
If somebody...
No, I don't want a beer, but I would like a lot of water.
Or let's say three glasses of water, if somebody could orchestrate that.
Thank you.
The question is, does NORAD actually use the...
Resonant frequency of the earth to use deep sea.
I am not a technical person, I don't know, but my guess is no.
If you really want to get a Navy Admiral really, really pissed off, tell him you figured out how to blow up all those antennas on the golf course outside of Annapolis.
Okay, because that's how they communicate with submarines.
Very low frequency stuff.
And so they have this huge thing, they have another one up in Boston, yes.
Humans have never been valued in intelligence.
Look, I'll tell you, we are really in deep, deep shit.
Because we have spent all of our money on collection technology.
I have a list of 18 technologies when I was...
Thank you very much.
I have a list of... thank you.
By the way, I really want to compliment you guys.
I've told all the media people, and when we turn the lights on, I want to introduce you all to the Canadian and British TV people.
And have them talk for one minute about what they are doing, so those of you that they haven't talked to can choose to talk to them.
They are doing documentaries on the good side of hacking.
And I think it's important that you all really appreciate that.
And if they miss the mark, we'll hunt them down and kill them.
So , going back to that frequency thing, I mean, basically we do this very low frequency.
They just did something neat where they connected to the internet from underwater.
You know, but I've got to tell you something.
Our military infrastructure is not only underfunded, well, it's underfunded, it's being spent on the wrong things, and the wrong things are 20 years old.
Most of our aircraft are going into their 30th to 40th year.
This is really bad shit.
We are buying less and less of more and more expensive things with more and more bells and whistles that can go wrong and bring the plane down.
We have completely lost sight of the fact that the future, the 21st century security environment is four different threat classes.
There's the conventional rogue state, nuclear, conventional armies, tanks, all that stuff.
Then there's the low-intensity conflict, criminals, terrorists, you know, bad people doing violence.
Then you have the hardest one that we are just not willing to come to grips with, and that's what I call the low-tech Sears.
That's the people with brains en masse.
There is a Slavic-Islamic confrontation shaping up that we're nowhere near understanding along the borders of the Soviet Union and the Muslim countries.
And then finally you have the high-tech threat, which is a combination of economic espionage and economic incompetence.
We've talked about Bill Gates and the software impact.
I mean, his software is having a dramatically negative impact on American productivity.
And I don't know what to do about it.
But it's legal.
Oh, that's his idea of giving you a good time, by the way.
I think Melissa is the best thing that ever happened to Bill Gates.
Melinda, whatever.
She just divorced him when his stock took a nosedive.
What?
Well, then maybe Melissa is the best thing that ever happened to him.
Anybody got an umbrella?
Alright, there was a question there, and then this lady here.
Hang on, you guys have asked a question, so I'm going to do first shots.
Yes?
You know, I use Copernic.com to search the Internet.
And there are some things like a center from SRE International that are being used now to search all messages pertaining to SEC matters, to look for insider trading and stuff like that.
My best gut feel is that FBI has already fucked it up and it doesn't really work.
And I wouldn't be too worried about it.
But, of course, everybody should have a signature block that says, you know, terrorism, proliferation, bring down the government, you know, and whatnot.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to work, you know.
Let me go back to the Oklahoma bombing, because I was the only guy that got it right on TV.
I said it was a disgruntled postal worker.
You know, everybody else was saying it was Islamics.
Islamics don't go to Oklahoma.
The Washington Post did a three newsprint page story on the three months in McVeigh's life prior to the bombing.
The man was running his mouth everywhere on what he was planning to do.
But the citizens that were hearing him didn't know what they were hearing and they didn't know who to tell and the government didn't know how to listen.
Now, I have an Italian friend, Alessandro Politti, who at my first conference coined the concept of the intelligence minute man.
And, of course, you've got Calvin Kelly's wonderful book on Out of Control, which was very badly marketed.
But it's one of the top ten books of the decade as far as I'm concerned.
Consilience might be up there too, which I still don't understand.
Hive mind.
The whole idea here is we're all connected.
I mean, a North Korean cell was wrapped up in South Florida because a woman reported their stinking cooking.
I mean, literally, their cooking stunk.
I mean, Korean cooking really smells very potent and powerful.
And that led to an investigation which led to finding people that were out of place.
We all have a responsibility.
And the really, really scary thing, and I know Wynn's done a lot of work in this area, is information attacks, which you know far better than I, can be both very, very catastrophic and very, very anonymous.
The government's not ready for that.
And the government is not going to be ready for that until there is a system in place for people to not only protect themselves, because corporate America is not spending the money it should be spending on protecting data.
The intellectual property of the private sector is the center of gravity for national security in the information age.
But we're not spending the money.
We don't have the laws that require due diligence.
So corporate America is literally fucking the stockholders.
Because the stockholders don't realize that a recipe for Coca-Cola or whatever went out the door long ago.
I mean, Alvin Toffler was one of the first to say, when information is stolen in the digital age, you don't know what's missing.
Because your copy is still there.
These are complex issues that you're much better at than I am.
But I think these are things we have to do.
Now this lady has been waiting very patiently.
Okay
, and we understand.
How are they taking this?
I mean, they're the latest, you know, intelligence agency to be battered.
I mean, people didn't even know they existed.
No such agency.
And the NRO, too.
I mean, it's really great.
I like to torment them when I meet someone from the NRO.
I say, NRO, NRO, NRO.
Because they have this obsessive culture of secrecy that is now irrelevant.
First off, any time I start worrying about the intelligence community getting too big for its britches, Hollywood brings them down a notch, and that's good.
They're not as good as everyone thinks.
Actually, my concern is intelligence community tools getting in the hands of a redneck sheriff who has no capability for being smart.
I mean, the thing about killing the blind guy to get his land, that was pretty scary.
I think we do have a lot of out-of-control people out there.
And so, Hollywood is good in that respect.
Yes, sir?
Of all the data that you've seen throughout the year, it absolutely has to be maintained as a secret.
Less than 10%.
How much of that really is maintained?
All of it forever.
So, if you gather 100% of the data, all of that data is classified in some way?
Forever .
They keep refusing to publish it.
In fact, the history of the foreign relations of the United States, about two years ago, had an absolutely unprecedented forward, which said this history is not accurate and cannot be accurate because those assholes over at Langley won't let us declassify the documents on foreign relations that are needed to write the official American history of foreign relations for this period.
First of all
, are there techniques involved in obtaining information, stuff like man-eye trapping, stuff like Tempest, etc.?
To a certain extent, yes.
Go ahead and ask a very specific question about capabilities.
What he had asked was how much of the information I've seen should be secret, 100%, and how much of it will remain secret, 100%.
A specific question about capabilities would be the man-eye trapping.
Is it actually in use?
Is it actively in use?
And what infrastructure is required?
What is the...
VanEck trapping.
Oh, VanEck shit.
Christ, that's old.
The short answer is that that falls in a very narrow area where, yes, we can do it.
Of course we can read a computer screen from across the street out of a van.
But not every case officer can do that.
That requires the technical section to actually do it.
And so we don't do it very much.
Also, let me tell you from personal experience.
When you do an electronic interception, you get a lot of data.
You get more data than a human can handle.
For instance, when I was handling terrorists, there were some very sensitive cases where it was compartmented, and I had to actually type the transcripts myself.
And I will tell you from personal experience that for every hour of conversation, it takes a minimum of four hours, and only if you've been there and know what was said, it takes a minimum of four hours to type it up.
And there will be less than five minutes of valuable information in that transcript.
So the labor economics are not there.
We've had reports officers walk off the job and quit.
I'll tell you what really screwed CIA was the Robert Morris worm.
Because until that happened, we were sucking all kinds of data out of computers all over the world.
And when that happened, a whole bunch of doors slammed shut.
People went in looking for these issues, and we literally got shut out.
It didn't improve your security, and it really didn't do anything constructive other than save them from wasting more of your taxpayer dollars.
But the fact is, we're really bad at post-processing.
We're really bad at doing technical things with what we get, so that a human can then handle it in a reasonable amount of time.
Yes?
Go ahead.
What do they know about us?
Okay.
It is my humble opinion.
By the way, for all the times I haven't said it, it's my humble opinion.
It's my humble opinion.
It's my view that, by and large, the U.S.
government does not spy on you.
If they are spying on you at the federal level, it's because they have a reasonable or probable cause to believe that you are either an agent of a foreign power or you are breaking some federal law.
Now, having said that, people at the...
Yeah, we'll have kind of controlled chaos, and we'll do it like the White House newsroom, and you guys...
This person is next, okay?
Having said that, people abuse that power.
For example, the FBI has at least 900 authorized telephone intercepts around the country.
But I'm pretty sure they've probably done another 2,500 illegally in order to get the focusing they need to go get the court order to get the legal ones.
Okay?
And I think at the state and local level, that probably happens as well.
I still believe we have the best government in the world.
And, I mean, it's a government that's so good that it doesn't matter who's president.
Okay?
And so there's some positive things here.
So I, frankly, am not concerned about domestic spying.
Now, I am concerned about the way we've been treating hackers.
I mean, one of the best books ever written on this was Bruce Sterling's book on hacker crackdown.
I have written to judges.
I tried to keep FiberOptic out of jail.
My wife would have been really pissed if he had had to come live with us.
But I was ready to do that.
You know, it's ignorance.
And one of the things that most impresses me between this year and 1994 is you all have come of age.
I mean, people have to take you seriously.
And I think the media, the media with an open mind that isn't out to make quick book sales, is going to take you seriously.
I'm a little disappointed that we didn't have more CNN and stuff like that.
But I think your story is being told and will get told.
And the best way for you to succeed is, A, do no harm.
I mean, don't give them a reason to sue your ass and send you to jail.
But embarrass the shit out of them.
Okay?
Over there and then over there.
And then there.
Okay, you decide who's next.
Alright, go ahead.
Continuing the question about the Bainette question.
Okay, with the government's experience with Mitnick, Folsom, and maybe others that I'm not saying, how bad does it need to be for them to use that old technology?
What are the cases that need to be in place for them to use that technology?
In other words, how hard should it be for them to scratch?
I... well, first off, what they're doing these days is not using Bainette.
They're putting little beacons inside the computer that is trans...
You're saying that when an actual break-in happens, the computer gets dismounted and the device gets planted inside it?
Yes .
Okay.
That was the suspicion of a number of people using PGP, that the cameras and devices get implanted into...
Well, for those of you that don't know about it, when American PGP comes out, they add 3,600 bits of backdoor and post it all over Europe.
So all you cool dudes from Europe using American PGP, they're reading you.
Over here.
A state investigative body who later tried to bring me on in a more permanent capacity, and they told me, they were quite sanguine about the issue of encryption when I brought it up when I was touring their facilities.
Yes, we have, under certain circumstances, depending on how critical it is to focusing the case, the capability to send encrypted documents off to NSA for decryption.
Where they will be treated like shit and ignored, by and large.
Okay, because it's not national security, but go on.
Right, right.
Well, I mean...
You pretty much answered it.
I didn't know...
Look, by and large, what you got to remember is government is a bureaucracy.
Okay, and bureaucracies are really cumbersome, lazy.
They fall into patterns.
They're largely ignorant of new changes in technology and opportunity.
People don't get fired for muddling through.
So it's really not a major threat.
Another question?
Yeah
?
What's that?
It's warm, too.
Yeah.
Well, I think intelligence people retire everywhere.
A lot of them tend to go back to wherever they either went to college or grew up.
No, I mean, my house is northwest of Washington, D.C.
which is good because the prevailing winds for biochemical attack are in the other direction.
And I do worry about that.
I fully anticipate that there will be a biochemical attack on Washington, D.C.
sometime in the next 10 years.
Now, the good news is it kind of blows through quick.
And if you hear about a biochemical attack, go as low as you can in the building.
And with luck, it won't reach down.
But we've got violent plagues out there.
Another question?
Okay .
Loud.
What was the second weapon?
Desktop weapons like Microsoft?
I'm sorry.
Cheap shot.
Is there a possibility that these nanoparticles may reorganize the bacteria?
I'd say, well, first off, you've got a very good army biological lab in Maryland.
I think that we do have stores of biological weapons.
I think we are doing some development, but largely in the vaccine area.
But, of course, we created this problem ourselves in the first place.
On the nano thing, I have no special knowledge.
But I'll also tell you an amusing anecdote.
There was a time, and this is in one of the many books on CIA that I've read, there was a time when the director, it might have been Bill Colby, ordered them to destroy their stock of bioweapons.
Their equivalent to the umbrella poison.
And it got down to the division chief responsible for that, and he chose to ignore the order because he knew that we'd need them one day.
So he didn't fill out the order.
So in this large bureaucracy, there is a lot of stuff that is probably still here and there that is not fixed up.
Over here someplace?
Yes, sir.
With a bomb?
They blew it up?
Same guy that blew up the whale.
Any comment or question?
That was just an observation?
I really am concerned.
Charles Perrow wrote a wonderful book called Normal Accidents Living with High Risk Technologies.
We haven't read it.
I mean, we really need to worry about this shit.
And I don't think, you know, nuclear toxic waste and stuff, and toxic dumping in Africa is another issue.
Okay, over there, and then here, and then there.
I'm still trying to do first.
The NSA decided to do Tao about that.
I think that Mike Hayden is a very smart general.
His biggest problem is his own people.
I helped in a very, very small way encourage Barbara McNamara to move to London.
She was his deputy and he basically came in and she told him to fuck off.
Which senior civilians can do under certain circumstances.
And he finally got her out of town.
London, by the way, is where we send all our people that have been fired at the senior level.
We need NSA.
However, old dogs need to learn new tricks.
Now, I have a speech, I think it's up on my website in the open forum, on all the reasons why encumbered encryption isn't good.
And I don't need to go through them here.
But the reality is the encryption monster is out of the bag.
I mean, I personally have worked in operations where the terrorists were using Swiss encryption boxes.
And the only way to get at their communications was actually do a break in entry and get a print of the thing.
This was back in the 80s.
Encryption is out of the bag.
We have to learn new tricks.
And those tricks include planting audio devices while the stuff is still in the clear.
They include better use of clandestine recruitments across a wider range of targets.
They include use of open source information, which we don't use.
I mean, we don't read the sick newspaper in British Columbia, which talked about the impending nuclear explosion in India, you know, a month and a half.
We don't read the Indian newspapers that have notices telling everybody to evacuate their ass, because on Thursday there's going to be a really big bang.
We don't read provincial newspapers, by and large.
And finally, it really helps to have smart people who can intuit anomalies and detect changes in patterns and so on, based on the feel of the thing.
We haven't made that investment either.
So there's a lot wrong.
Hang on, you guys know who you are.
Next question.
I have no insight to that.
What is the state of NSA's encryption technology?
Oh, decryption technology.
You know, the truth be told, I think that NSA is probably still in the 1970s, at the bottom line level.
Most of their supercomputers and craze and all that stuff are 70s and early 80s stuff.
I mean, we owe them a debt.
They helped fund Cray.
The U.S.
government has kicked off a lot of good things in technology.
But I don't think they're doing a lot of distributed processing.
But here's the real bad part.
They're vacuum cleaning the world, but then they're not able to sort and sift that stuff down.
And they're not able to process enough of it.
Now, I'll also give you another insight.
90% of the value of signals intelligence is not from decrypting the message.
It's from pattern analysis.
90% of the value of signals is from pattern analysis.
If you all of a sudden see a new set of signals going between North Korea and Miami, Florida, this is a clue.
Pattern analysis is where most of it's at.
The reality is we don't have the time.
We certainly don't have the language skills.
I mean, you want to screw with the U.S.
government, just hold all your conversations in Urdu, or Tamil, or Tagalog.
We really stink at foreign languages.
And so what you've got to do is you've got to get to the point where a lot of this stuff is either declassified or it's outsourced to people who speak that language who can do the translation.
I've been trying to tell the intelligence community for years that the private sector can keep a secret without having a clearance.
I mean, most of us want to be able to earn our money honestly and to get that money and that client again.
And so we're willing to, you know, I have people that translate Arabic for me, and Indonesian, and things like that.
And they're all over the world when I need them.
And I only pay them for what they do.
And I'm pretty sure they're not posting everything.
And even if they did post what they were translating, it doesn't matter because it wasn't secret in the first place.
Over here, both of you.
Oh, no, not you.
You've already asked the question.
You.
Well, by and large, if you actually come from that culture or you're married to someone in that culture, you're ineligible for a clearance because you must not be a totally loyal U.S.
citizen.
That's our first problem.
Our second problem is that we have this pattern of hiring from these predominantly white kinds of schools.
And we hire cheap.
My personal feeling is that nobody should be allowed to work for the CIA as an analyst or a case officer until they speak the language at the four level on a scale of five.
Most case officers go out on their first tour speaking the language at a two level, which is just enough to be laughed at.
We're not taking this seriously.
We're going through the motions.
I will tell you right now, I've spoken to the directors of intelligence communities in 18 different countries around the world, or deputy directors, and they usually take me to dinner.
And I always ask the question, how many of our people have you nailed?
In other words, how many of the people operating out of the official U.S.
facility?
I'm not allowed to say embassy.
That's the only thing CIA took out of my book was three references to operating out of the U.S.
embassy, which I didn't make.
You guys are getting tired, I can tell.
I'll stop at midnight.
Or I'll go on as long as you wish.
Okay, all right, good, thank you.
I'm glad to be useful.
In every single case, I have not gotten a direct verbal answer, but as a highly skilled case officer, I will tell you the answer is no less than 75%.
You know, as my 11-year-old would say, if you're going to run spies, it doesn't make sense to do so out of a known fixed point, where you're bouncing in and out 10, 15 times a day, spending more money than the ambassador has in his personal budget, and you're under 25.
Duh.
Okay.
My personal feeling is fully 75% of our clandestine operations, and probably as much as 90% in most countries of the world, have been compromised.
Those agents are either under control or they're known, and they're simply letting us stay busy.
Clandestine intelligence worldwide is a joke.
And the reason this is dangerous is because the President of the United States thinks he has a clandestine service that can actually do shit.
Okay?
And that's scary.
Now, I don't want to have any repeat questions, so let's... I'll tell you what, everyone who has asked a question before, I'll stay as long as you want to answer your question afterwards, but I want first-timers.
Yes, sir.
You, and then you, and then you.
Going back to domestic, we've read reports...
Going back to domestic spying, we've read reports...
...on presidential administrations...
Presidential administrations.
...running operations against individual citizens to find information.
Right.
What types of checks are in place to prevent that, and how do we put those checks in place?
Well, at the federal level, I think that our federal officers, by and large, have very high integrity.
Waco may be an exception.
You know, I'll tell you, I was surprised, because I went around the country after Waco, and I was expecting people to more or less feel like the government did what it did, and it was the Davidians that were wrong.
I was stunned at how many of my middle-class professional counterparts had a real deep-seated uneasiness with the government.
I mean, this was beyond this group.
This was mainstream, main-street, white-collar professionals.
By and large, though, I think that one of the good things that's come out of the whistleblowing era is that, first off, the president's never been in charge of anything.
There's a wonderful book by Richard Neustadt called The Power to Persuade, and George Shultz has said in testimony in Congress that nothing's ever decided in Washington.
You have to argue the policy every single day.
But by and large, I think officers of integrity, certainly Dick Helms and Bill Coby over at CIA were officers of integrity, they can say no.
At the state and local level, I don't know.
I don't think domestic spying is an issue, my personal feeling.
On the other hand, hacker crackdown, you have field officers out there that are zealous, they want to get promoted, you look really evil, and that scares them because they don't understand you.
And so they'll make a case, and they'll go do stuff.
And I think if I were a hacker, with a whole bunch of metal in my body, wearing really black clothes all the time, and colored spiked hair, and I found out I was under investigation, number one, I wouldn't do any shit that could get me locked up, and number two,
I'd go public immediately.
I would go to the newspapers, and I would say, this is who I am, and these guys are investigating me, and here's my life, and I invite everybody to come in and make sure there's nothing to find.
I invite everybody to come in and look at me, and I would be Little Miss Priss for the next ten years.
I don't know the case myself.
What's that?
Yeah, fiber is a good one.
My personal opinion, and I have a neighbor that's a secret service officer, and I think secret service officers are good, good people, but I think this guy had his head up his ass.
I mean, fiber's not a threat to national security.
But these people, out of genuine deep-seated belief about stuff they don't understand, think so, and they're willing to tell a judge, and until you raise the consciousness level, shit like that's going to happen.
The good news is, I don't think it's happening very much anymore.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
You know, I think you've succeeded.
You've won this war.
Now it's a question of whether you want to go corporate and make money fixing these holes, or whether you want to do other things.
But by and large, I think the days of hacker crackdown per se are over.
You are now arguably the most important talent on the planet, except for the guys in India.
What's that?
I wish I could hire, you know, I'm looking for five million dollars.
What I do is very hard.
That's all right.
We'll figure it out.
Over here?
I'd be happy to do that.
I'm glad that you asked, because that's a useful, very interesting...
I don't think so, although I'm concerned about these slap lawsuits and intimidation tactics like that.
Business intelligence, first off, is not very widespread.
Only 5% of U.S.
corporations and 9% of European corporations have a structured business intelligence unit.
And until my partner, Jan Herring, entered the private sector in 1988 and created the first business intelligence unit for Motorola, and then he went on to create them for Monsanto, and Phillips Petroleum, and Ford Credit, and Southwest Bell, and a few others.
The process of national intelligence, which is requirements definition, collection management, multi-source validation and fusion, and then compelling presentation in a timely fashion, had not been applied in the private sector.
We have a little circle of competitors as we're looking at our business plan and trying to shop for $5 million.
And fully half of our competitors are our clients themselves.
Roughly 20% are middle managers who read the Wall Street Journal and think they know more than anyone, and therefore they're going to make these decisions.
And they're not really computing the fact that some guy in China is about to eat their lunch.
Then there's another 20% or so that are the strategic marketing guys, the strategic planning guys, and they're doing a little bit of outsourced research to Forrester and Jupiter and these folks, but they don't have this process in place for getting the question right and then knowing collection management and what's out there and so on and so forth.
And then you get finally into this other half, which is all these little niche services.
You have three serious business intelligence outfits in the United States and a number of others that I consider less serious.
Fulden Company up in Boston, SIS International here in New York, and Kirk Tysons in Chicago.
These are all little 15 to 30 person mom and pop shops that are not web smart.
And they basically do it the old fashioned way, which is they combine online research with Dow Jones Interactive, which by the way has eclipsed Dialog and LexisNexis as the best place to start if you're looking at stuff that's less than two years old.
Okay, I'll get to Pinkerton.
They're an investigative agency by and large, although they're doing the security thing for cyberspace.
So you've got three business intelligence outfits by and large.
You've got the big A.
You've got Pricewaterhouse and Arthur D.
Little and all that stuff.
I reviewed $40 million worth of one of these large companies' production for a year for a major client.
$40 million.
You know what it bought?
It bought a room about this big, full of three ring binders, full of paper, put together by junior MBAs who were clueless about the problem being solved, who did not identify their sources and who did no aggregate analysis.
And it wasn't delivered in soft copy.
$40 million.
That's the level of these big A's.
Then you have academics.
You've got the Harvard guys.
By the way, do we want to take a five minute break and go on?
Do we want to just go on and you guys just leave and go to the bathroom?
What do you want me to do?
I'm here for as long as you want.
I've got a plane at 9.30 tomorrow.
A.M.
or P.M.?
A.M.
But I don't need sleep.
So you have the Harvard consultants.
They have what are called information brokers.
If you're a professional and you're looking for information and you want to go beyond the internet and you don't want to subscribe to LexisNexis or Dialog or one of these things, what you do is for $99 you can buy the Burwell Worldwide Directory of Information Brokers.
This is the best $99 you're ever going to spend on content.
She's got a website.
I think it's BurwellInc.com.
She has a directory of people who do information research for a living.
These are information brokers.
Many of them are doing it out of their home as a kind of second career librarians, whatever.
And at my suggestion, well first off, she has an index by topic and by country.
So you can find the little old lady in tennis shoes who speaks Portuguese and has spent her entire career doing the Brazilian nuclear industry.
This is useful.
And at my suggestion, in 1994, she added an index by language.
So if you need someone who speaks Urdu or Tamil and is an information professional, you can go in there and if they're in her directory, you'll find them.
These people are very reasonable.
They're generally about $75 an hour plus the cost of collection.
And so for anywhere from $250 to $1,000, you can get a pretty decent commercial online pull of this stuff.
And it's valuable.
But nobody has actually put it all together because now you get into these other niches.
If you're doing Caspian Sea oil production or pipeline planning, it's really helpful to have a map.
But we don't have maps of the Caspian Sea energy area.
The Russians do.
For $300 a map sheet, I can get just about any Russian military map.
In fact, I was stunned to find out that I could get Vladivostok.
Huh?
No, Terraserver is shit.
Well, no, Terraserver is actually not making any sales.
Terraserver is getting millions of hits and no buyers.
And that's too bad.
Yes and no.
Let me run through the commercial imagery options.
The only company in the world that has the entire earth at 10 meters, which is the least acceptable, you know, the highest acceptable resolution, entire earth, roughly less than three years old, cloud free, is spot image.
And they're based in Toulouse, France, and they're French, so the Americans aren't going to buy shit from them, which is really dumb.
Next best is Canadian radar sat, which has the real advantage of being able to see in the night.
It's all weather, you know, it can take an image any time, it can get through clouds and all that stuff, but it's a really ugly baby.
And there are a lot of people who can't deal with that kind of source.
Then you have Indian five meter, but it only has one satellite, so it's too long between double looks to do contour lines and all that stuff.
And then you have Russian two meter, only mysteriously it doesn't lose resolution when you pump it to one meter.
They're selling one meter and pretending it's two meter.
And then you have American one meter, but the problem with all of these other sources is they have to go take the picture.
They're not in the archives.
It's harder to pull together all of this stuff.
It's also very expensive if you're the first buyer and they're doing the collection just for you, it's much better to buy from the archives.
So you have Russian military maps, you have commercial imagery.
You can put boots on the ground with a digital camera and an engineering degree anywhere in the world in 48 hours.
By going to an outfit in England that has all these SAS guys that are trained combat engineer surveyors who can go in and do a road survey, they can tell you what the bridge loading capability is.
Did you know the United States doesn't know what bridge loading capability is all around the world?
We build 70 ton tanks because we thought it was a good idea.
Now let's deconstruct that a little bit.
Okay, 70 ton tank.
Now Navy ships, first off, weren't built to carry 70 ton tanks.
And Navy landing craft weren't built to carry 70 ton tanks.
So when you put a 70 ton tank in there, you lose like five trucks and three artillery pieces.
Turns out, only 50% of the world has a port that will allow pier side offload.
Because we need a depth of five fathoms, about 35 feet.
We need a turning radius for the ships.
We need all kinds of shit, right?
So okay, we are going to take a 70 ton tank and we are going to take it from a ship moving nine different directions at once into a landing craft moving nine different directions at once and then we are going to take it to this beach.
Well, 80% of the world has no cross country mobility.
Okay, so the 70 ton tank is going to sit and look real pretty on this beach.
Except for six countries in the world.
And, oh by the way, Europe doesn't sell trucks to the third world, if we move it on the road, that weigh more than 30 tons.
There is a reason for this.
So this 70 ton tank, which can shoot 3,000 meters, I mean it is a really mean, mean, mean thing.
It can kill a fly at 3,000 meters.
Well, it turns out your line of sight distance in most of the world is under 1,000 meters.
Except for six countries.
Okay, and it is just an incredible thing.
Let's take aviation as an example.
Because this was my first study.
We build airplanes for a standard aviation day that is warm and not humid.
Roughly 65 degrees and not humid.
It turns out that all these countries where we are going to, the Somalias and Burundis of the world, are 80 degrees and humid.
This is a 50% difference in how far you can go, how much you can carry, and how long you can stay overhead.
Our aircraft are literally at 50% of their operating capacity in all these hot countries.
But try and explain that to the colonel in charge.
And basically all of the embassies are more than the round trip refueling distance of the CH-46 helicopter from the Navy platform.
We will pretend that the Navy will come into the Five Fathom Line.
In fact, the Navy likes to stay way, way, way out.
Because we are outgunned by coastal artillery from most nations of the world, including Pisan nations.
Okay, so Navy stays way out.
Well, it means you are going to have to set up a forward area refueling point to refuel all these helicopters as you are trying to get all these Americans out of the embassies.
And oh, by the way, ambassadors refuse to evacuate their embassies until they are actually coming over the wall.
So this makes it real hard to keep them from coming over the wall and get 600 people out at the same time.
So these are what I call strategic generalizations.
The Pentagon is clueless on strategic generalizations.
They don't buy weapons systems based on need and they don't buy weapons systems based on global, worldwide realities.
And that is why you have a Department of Defense that is largely irrelevant to the threat facing the United States in the 21st century.
Bradley fighting?
Oh, the arsenal ship!
The arsenal ship!
The United States Navy had a great idea.
They decided we don't like sailors getting killed and we are running out, you know.
So they came up with an arsenal ship, which is a ship that is bigger than an aircraft carrier, run by 50 people, which shoots precision munitions.
Well, let's deconstruct that a little bit.
First off, what you really need in the U.S.
Navy is a global presence that allows you to put one platoon of Marines anywhere in 24 hours, a company in 48, a battalion in 72, and a full up Marine Expeditionary Force in a week.
What does that mean?
It means you have to have that kind of ship thing, right?
So you have to have a whole bunch of frigates out there, destroyers, you have to have small amphibious vehicles that carry a company at a time.
They are all spread out and then you have what I call the pile-on concept.
Marines kept our embassy in Somalia from being taken over because they flew from 400 miles out, they put a platoon on the ground as they were coming over the wall.
Usually one platoon will do it and then you beef up.
We don't do that.
The United States Navy likes things that are really big.
So they will put 1,000 Marines on one ship that a single diesel subskipper can take out.
Because, oh by the way, Marine operations aren't important enough for an aircraft carrier to protect.
So we send the Marines in harm's way without aircraft carriers.
This is just insanity.
Insanity.
That's cool.
We've proposed an aircraft carrier the size of a small island.
Americans don't like programs unless they are really, really big, really, really expensive and very likely to fail.
In the United States intelligence community anyway.
There was a question here, sir.
Desert countries.
Which six countries could the M1A1 reach out over 3,000 meters?
Had Saddam Hussein swung right and kicked some ass in the other Arab countries, we might not have been able to get him out.
He gave us the luxury of six months to build up to the perfect thing.
I will tell you with certainty, we could not do the Gulf War again today.
I won a war game once by sinking a ship in Charleston Harbor and wrapping C4 det cord around the nose wheels of all of the aerial tankers and all of the AWACS planes.
Americans were out of Schlitz.
I took out their airborne tankers, their airborne command and control craft, and I stopped all the strategic movement out of Charleston Harbor.
By sinking a freighter in there, a Colombian freighter.
We don't think in these terms.
It would be really neat if we had a DOD that actually thought about the world and what it needs.
Ike Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex.
Well, we are reaping the dividends now of a military industrial complex that's run amok with old technology that's highly secret that none of you can impact on.
That's a shame.
Someone else?
Okay, what agency?
This sounds like an interesting question.
The U.S.
Army's Land Information Warfare Agency is certainly here.
The U.S.
Air Force Special Security guys are here and they've learned not to wear black shoes.
I thought that was hysterical at HOPE.
At HOPE 94 there were all these two-man teams walking around looking like male models in white t-shirts and shorts and black military shoes.
It was too cool for words.
Let me tell you, these people are your friends.
And one of the things that I wish they would do is what's done at DEFCON, which is they identify themselves and they learn from you.
What's that?
If anyone wants to take off their clothes and identify themselves as a federal officer, you're welcome to do so.
But you know, really, these people, I happen to think a lot of Lee was.
I think it's probably the best outfit we've got in this area.
I suspect the FBI has several people here and they figured out I don't have an artificial leg and I'm not Agent Steele.
They tried to arrest me in Chicago.
It was two football captains and a prom queen.
And I had just flown in from Australia.
Got in at 5 in the morning and they wake me up at 5.30 with room service.
I didn't order, room service.
So it was a very tentative little voice that says FBI.
So I walked naked to the door, opened the door partly, and they immediately established that I did not have a false leg and they let me go back to sleep for my 8.30 meeting.
You know, they're your friends too.
Mike Vaddis is running a critical infrastructures protection outfit that is out of money.
He's broke.
He doesn't have what he needs to do his job.
And I'll also tell you, in my judgment, we're in deep shit because the government isn't the one that's going to have to solve this problem.
It's the private sector.
All the government can do is set standards and legislate due diligence and provide some threat intelligence and guidance.
The private sector is still stonewalling this issue from what I can see.
And so it needs to become more public and frankly it's going to be typical American.
We're going to need a Pearl Harbor, which is Wynn's phrase by the way.
We're going to need a Pearl Harbor.
We're going to need a major meltdown.
Aside from terrorism, what are your thoughts speaking with Pearl Harbor
as a major event?
It's going to happen.
Does the government stand on how they're going to deal with it unless they're so ignorant they haven't even come up with the idea that it's possible?
And what are they going to do about it?
Clean up.
You know, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is a very important agency.
And I think it's got its act together with respect to its vehicles and things that it moves and all this stuff.
I think we're just going to have to take our hits.
And shit happens.
And this is now an era where that's going to happen.
Now the good news is that all the druggies and criminals and most of these people are not going to cause such a problem because they're making too much money stealing us blind.
And so I think the people that are really good at this stuff are doing the percentage shaves on money and the transfers of inactive accounts and things like that.
And I have no personal technical knowledge in this area.
Well, I'm actually speaking more along the lines of people making statements through terrorist activities
.
So bringing down large systems and such to make a statement against the United States and how the United States is dealing with that.
I know FEMA handles a lot of the emergency stuff and they do wonderful cleanup work and they have a relatively well organized organization.
But what I'm talking about is not necessarily... it's more oriented towards what's going to happen when people are making a statement on a digital level.
It's going to cause... you know, it's funny, Y2K really disappointed everybody.
Because Stuart Brand sent me an email and he was saying, you know, Y2K is a whiff of the carnage to come.
But it turned out to be a little hiccup, mostly because we spent a lot of money on it and the Swedes and the Russians fixed their nuclear code and stuff like that.
I'll tell you, I think in all probability these people would probably choose to blackmail us.
For instance, I worry, you know, most of our code, most of our critical code is written in Moscow and Calcutta.
And nothing against all of my bright Indian friends that are here.
But I worry about the day when India decides to nuke Pakistan and they tell us in advance and they say, oh, by the way, keep your fucking mouth shut or all that code that we've planted is going to self-activate tomorrow.
And if you let us go for 30 days, at the end of 30 days we'll give you a partial anecdote.
Anecdote?
Antidote?
I'm a marine, you know, I can't speak English.
Okay, hang on a second.
Is there anybody that hasn't asked a question?
Okay, are you guys trying to throw us out?
I mean, I work well in the dark.
I'm from the government.
Okay, over here.
Alright, we're going to go one, two, three, four, five, and then six.
First-timers only.
Go ahead.
I need three more glasses of water.
Every major fuck-up that's gone on in this country has stemmed from the CIA.
The taking of Noriega.
That started with a Florida district attorney that way overstepped his bounds and then a sequence of events happened.
That was not CIA.
CIA called a no-shoot from CLT3 during Desert Storm.
And the list goes on.
All they do is provide bad intelligence.
Well, let me tell you...
Look, I am privileged to support... I mean, if you've got a hard-on for CIA, that's okay with me.
I am privileged to support the Special Operations Command, and I believe that we suck at providing intelligence to military activities.
We suck even more at providing intelligence support for diplomatic activities.
That's a real good question.
My personal feeling is... thank you very much.
My personal feeling is that the $30 billion that we're spending... and by the way, it's really $50 billion if you count all the military people that move things around and provide infrastructure support and all of that.
My personal feeling is that the American public is not getting its money's worth from American intelligence today.
And that this problem will continue until we have a Director of Central Intelligence that comes to grips with two key facts.
The first is that he doesn't know 90% of what he needs to know.
And the second is that his job is to inform the President that he needs to do that in partnership with the private sector.
And do it in an open, legal, and ethical way.
I mean, I've done all this shit, and I'll tell you something.
There's one good thing about Phil Agee's book.
Which is that he documents the pedestrian, day-to-day nature of a CIA case officer's life overseas.
And in any given third world country, we're not there to find out anything about that pissant country.
We're there to chase the Soviets.
And the Soviets hate that pissant country too, so they're happy to have drinks with us.
We're really not out there to learn anything about that country.
We're there to chase Soviets and Chinese and maybe the occasional Pakistani.
So we have a really flawed approach to what is our mission and how do we accomplish that mission.
And my book, I guarantee it will put you to sleep.
It is a hard book to read, but it's a book that tries to create a smart nation.
It tries to create a nation in which a SEAL team going into Colombia, for example.
And I know SOCOM's doing some really cool shit.
If you're going to put an observation team in clandestinely into, let's say, the Amazon, you can do commercial imagery so good that you can actually drop down in and do as if you were on the ground and just do a 360.
This is great.
This is what we should be doing.
And this is really good stuff.
But it's very expensive stuff, and NEMA only has $2.98 in its budget this year, and so they're not going to buy commercial imagery to support that kind of stuff.
They refuse to buy Russian military.
Here's a true story.
My friend Kent Lee from ECU Publications, and by the way, a lot of the companies that I talk about, my entire website is free, OSS.net, except for the 500,000 that's hidden behind client access.
But all these companies that I've referred to are in the open source marketplace, where there's a direct link through to their website.
There's no money involved.
Kent Lee got a price from the Russians for selling all of the Russian military maps for China at the $1,000 to $50,000 and $1,000 to $100,000 level for $5 million.
He went to the CIA and said, would you like to buy this?
And they said no.
He went to NEMA.
For those of you that don't know, NEMA, it's National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
They said no.
Six months later, the fact that the warehouse holding all these one-of maps, because they do one and then, you know, they can reproduce and if they have to, it burned down.
We're talking here of 100 million years of data extraction time on top of one meter imagery coverage of China.
This is how stupid we are.
NEMA is just hell-bent on not buying foreign commercial imagery or Russian military maps.
And it's a mistake.
It's wrong.
And the military guys, I have been spending...
Okay, security needs to break things down and manage the crowd.
Great talk.
Thanks.
Get the fuck off the stage.
Okay, no problem.
What do you want me to do?
I think security should work around me.
If you want... Look, anybody that wants to leave, go.
I mean, I'm only doing this as long as some of you want me to do this.
No, hey, security people, do your job.
Can this microphone stay active?
Listen, I'm cool with whatever you want to do.
I just can't do this again.
Okay.
This guy works for CIA and this is like Nodiega.
Remember where they played the rock music outside the embassy?
Okay, I'm leaving.
Alright, last question.
That's how I think of them.
Alright, last question.
Whoever thinks they have the most important question, shout it out.
Yes.
Of all the intelligence gathering that I did...
That's a good fucking question.
The question is, of all the intelligence that I did as a CIA person, and I think...
What we're going to do with all of these, in fact, could security do this now?
Take all of these out there.
Whatever you want to do, but put them out there so that we don't have a two-way thing.
Only the people that want to talk to me come up here.
And everybody else that wants one of these cool little globes, just get it on the table on the way out.
The question was, how much of the intelligence I did was broken down between informants and technical?
And what was the second half?
Alright, and what types of checks and balances did I have to...
That's an excellent question upon which to close.
This will be my last answer on this mic.
Ninety percent of the intelligence...
Can you at least let me finish this question without the radio?
Turn off the radios.
Let me have five minutes and then we're out of here.
By the way, I think security has done a great job, but I can see where the Nazis got into their thing.
You give somebody authority and they become Nazis.
Sorry, that's a cheap shot.
But you really did a good job.
Ninety percent of what I did was from recruiting people.
Where you basically spot someone.
By the way, what you're supposed to do is decide what your target is and then identify people that have access to the information you want and then gradually recruit them so that you get what it is you really need.
We don't do that.
What we do is we kind of stand out on the street corner with money in our hand and anybody that stops, we say, you now work for the CIA.
And then whatever they tell us is what goes back to Washington.
Ninety percent came from clandestine human.
Ten percent came from technical devices that we supported the implantation of.
And as far as accountability, what happens, first off, the case officer is supposed to be the first source of accountability.
And a case officer provides accountability by number one, reading the case files, except they're not in the field and most case officers don't go to headquarters to read the files, so they start their accounts with a clean sheet, meaning they know nothing about what's been reported previously by that asset.
Second is the case officers are supposed to be reading the local newspapers and have an understanding of the target and the context and the historical and all that, but they don't do that either.
So it's perfectly possible, and it happens very often, that an agent will read local, open-source information and then will concoct a relative.
We don't actually check to see if they have a relative in the foreign ministry.
And so that's the first level.
Then the second level is there's someone called a reports officer in every station, and that reports officer is an operational analyst.
That's the person who's responsible for reading the reports, making sure that they have all the right facts and everything.
Usually that person spends most of their time taking a really excellent report that's five or six or seven pages long and saying, this needs to become seven one-page reports because our numbers are down this month.
And so case officers spend half their time turning really good reports into seven really bad reports.
And then it goes back to Washington where there's another reports officer, who's still on the DO side now, who kind of checks it to see who should get it and release it and double-check the source description, which have now gotten pretty useless.
It used to be that you'd get source descriptions like a West German businessman who travels frequently to Brazil and understands the nuclear industry.
And now, because we've had some issues, as my 11-year-old would say, I think it needs to be converted, this is all in my book, it needs to be converted into a national intelligence agency that has world-class analysts and another thousand of them.
We need to kick the clandestine service out of town and create a clandestine service agency that's based in Philadelphia, doesn't wear button-down shirts, and is not allowed to visit Washington or work out of embassies.
Because it's halfway between New York and Washington and the guy that I want to run it likes Philly.
But actually what I do is I put the non-official cover offices for Latin America and Miami, for Europe and Boston, for Asia and Seattle, and , I don't know, for Africa.
Africa, I'd actually like to have a joint thing with the Brits out of London.
We're getting academics now to sit side-by-side with the analysts and so on.
But at the end of the day, and I will end with a line, and it's a little more negative than I'd like to end with, but it's highly relevant.
Herb Meyer, special assistant to Bill Casey, is quoted in Persico's biography of Basie as saying, these guys believe the only intelligence worth having is what they can steal.
They need to get reconnected to reality.
So that's where we're at.
I think we need national intelligence, we need to do a little bit of secrets, but my two most well-known sound lines are, number one, don't send a spy where a schoolboy can go, and number two, the problem with spies is they only know secrets.
And if you think about that, that's pretty scary.
Thank you very much.
I will be next door in the network room for as long as anyone wants to talk to me, if they're sober.
I'll just be in an informal system with no PA in the next room.