CIA reorganization accelerates AI adoption and cyberoperations to counter digital threats

C.I.A. Reorganization Prioritizes Cyberoperations

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, announced on Tuesday that the agency was reorganizing to ensure that it can adopt technology faster and further develop offensive cyberoperations division. He promised that the agency would use new technology more aggressively and take "smart risks," even as it prioritized human decision making and oversight of artificial intelligence and other innovations. The changes are intended to strengthen the C.I.A.'s ability to collect intelligence by gaining access to additional computer networks or communications, or even just locating additional potential human sources. The overhaul, Mr. Ratcliffe said, is an acknowledgment that in the modern world, digital borders are as important as physical borders. Artificial intelligence, he said, is raising the stakes in America's competition with its adversaries, since the new technology is itself a transformative weapon. "In conversations with many of the president's other national security and economic security advisers, we're talking about the impact of these frontier A.I. models," he said. "It would be, as we've talked about, not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons." To improve its collection, both through human spies and eavesdropping on communication networks, "more C.I.A. officers are going to have to become just as comfortable with handling lines of code as they are with handling human assets and sources," Mr. Ratcliffe said. But despite the focus on artificial intelligence and other new technologies, Mr. Ratcliffe said human beings, not computer models, would remain the decision makers. "The choices made by human beings will still determine the direction that we go," he said. "Good intelligence is always going to require good judgment, and only people can and should decide which is the right way to go." In his first major address as C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe went through the agency's recent successes, including precisely locating President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela so that Delta Force commandos could seize him from a military compound and identifying the location of a downed airman from the F-15E that crashed in Iran in March. Mr. Ratcliffe offered no new details of how the C.I.A. found the airman but attributed that success to the agency's technological advances. "It was a search that rested on our innovation, creativity and our technological know-how, " Mr. Ratcliffe said. "And ultimately it was a technology-enabled search that only the C.I.A. could successfully, and did successfully, pull off." He also said that drone technology and other advances had transformed how armies fight, and described the new dangers on the battlefield. Mr. Ratcliffe noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the frontline in Ukraine was less than 35 minutes. "Much of the reason is technology and how drones have become super-efficient, low-cost killing machines," Mr. Ratcliffe said. He avoided discussing the C.I.A.'s directorate of science and technology so as not to interfere with the inquiry into a member who was found with more than $40 million in gold bars in his home, according to court papers. The division has come under scrutiny from the F.B.I., the White House and Congress since the official's arrest in May. But he announced a broad reorganization of another technology-focused arm of C.I.A., the Directorate of Digital Innovation. The organization, which has been renamed the Directorate of Mission Systems, will focus on defensive cybersecurity and data infrastructure. C.I.A. officers specializing in offensive cyberoperations are now part of a new mission center, the Center for Cyber Intelligence. The center has been in operation since last year and has allowed the agency to deploy new offensive cybertools. Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency would work to improve how it teams up with private industry, which was also a priority of his predecessor, William J. Burns. But in recent months, Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency has more rapidly adopted new technologies developed by the private sector. "The whole process often took three years or even more," he said. "By that time, that technology had become outdated." The C.I.A., he said, was now adopting new technology within six months. Mr. Ratcliffe made his remarks at a summit sponsored by Amazon Web Services, which is the biggest provider of the classified cloud computing networks that are used by the C.I.A. and many other spy agencies for data-intensive analysis. Shortly before Mr. Ratcliffe spoke, senior officials from Amazon Web Services announced that it was making new investments that would make it easier for government contractors to develop classified applications and help intelligence agencies move more work to classified cloud. Amazon Web Services said it would invest to create new computing centers for private companies that are as secure as the government's classified cloud. The new data centers will allow military contractors and others to develop software and systems that can be smoothly adapted for classified government work. Dave Levy, a vice president at Amazon Web Services, also announced that the company would invest $1 billion to help the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies move older systems to a modern, high-speed cloud.

CIA to accelerate its use of AI, other advanced technologies

Director John Ratcliffe says the agency is reorganizing as it aims to maintain its edge. CIA Director John Ratcliffe used his first major public speech on Tuesday to announce steps that he said will revolutionize how the spy agency adopts artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies that are rapidly transforming espionage and warfare. The CIA has long used homegrown high-tech spy devices to aid its undercover officers around the globe. And, Ratcliffe said, CIA technology was integral to the January capture of Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, and the daring rescue of a U.S. pilot shot down over Iran in early April. But the spy agency also has a reputation, current and former officials say, for being a slow and wary adopter of technologies developed outside its Langley, Virginia, headquarters. "We recognize that when it comes to partnering with private industry, CIA hasn't always been the easiest agency to work with," Ratcliffe told an audience of tech executives at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington. The CIA chief announced a new division that will focus on cybersecurity and advanced data, as well as new procedures that will accelerate the agency's timeline for adopting new technologies from roughly three years to six months. "If this all sounds like redrawn lines on an org chart, it isn't," Ratcliffe said. "This is a fundamental reshaping of CIA's approach to technology." Catch up quickly every weekday morning with a rundown of the 7 most important and interesting stories. Sign up for The 7 newsletter.