The U.S. intelligence community should lean harder on industry and make fewer of its tech tools in-house, the director of national intelligence said Tuesday.
“I want to get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself because it’s really not what the government is best at doing, but really focusing on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can, so that our workforce can really focus on the things that we are very good at and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill,” Tulsi Gabbard said at Amazon Web Services’ annual public-sector conference in Washington, D.C.
Known examples of in-house systems include NSA’s XKeyscore, which helps intercept, store, and query communications along the internet backbone, and tools like HammerDrill and other USB-based intrusion methods largely designed by CIA’s Embedded Development Branch.
But for at least two decades, the nation’s 18 intelligence offices have also used industry-made tools to eavesdrop, hunt for cyber threats, analyze troves of data, and more. Amazon, for example, supplies systems that help the NSA and CIA store and exchange classified information. Other tech giants have done the same.
Last year, Gabbard’s predecessor, Avril Haines, said that the private sector “increasingly possesses certain unique and specialized talent, knowledge and capabilities in key fields of critical importance to national security that we don’t have access to in the government.”
In some of her first public thoughts on the private sector, Gabbard seemed to imply that there is far more outsourcing to be done—particularly with AI-powered tools.
She said that AI tools had helped scan thousands of documents released in a recent declassification push pertaining to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. She also said they’ve helped staff pore through documents and files available in the open internet.
“10,000 hours of media content, for example — that normally would take eight people 48 hours to comb through — now takes one person one hour, through the use of some of the AI tools that we have here.”
Gabbard has also pushed to create more unclassified spaces at Liberty Crossing—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s main campus in McLean, Virginia—arguing they will facilitate discussions with industry representatives.
“It’s crazy that, you know, when we have people who need to go out and have a Zoom call with someone, they have to go sit in the car outside and take that call,” she said. “There are rules in place that make it very difficult for people who are working in the private sector to come in and meet with our professionals and have robust conversations about exactly this: What solutions are you bringing to our work to make it so that we can better accomplish our mission?”
Gabbard, who had lacked formal intelligence experience before her nomination, has drawn criticism for her performance on the job. She installed a top adviser in the IC Inspector General’s office, a move that some former officials warned could compromise its integrity. One of her top aides pushed analysts to rewrite an intelligence document so it could not be used against the Trump administration, the New York Times reported last month. And in an ominous video posted Tuesday morning, Gabbard warned that the world was coming closer to a “nuclear annihilation” and said that “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” The video comes amid nuclear discussions between the U.S. and Iran.
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