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The Assignment with Audie Cornish

Each week on The Assignment, host Audie Cornish pulls listeners out of their digital echo chambers to hear from the people whose lives intersect with the news cycle. From the sex work economy to the battle over what’s taught in classrooms, no topic is off the table. Listen to The Assignment every Monday and Thursday.

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Yes, We're All Being Spied On
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Apr 27, 2023

Remember the Chinese spy balloon? Since then, we’ve seen leaked Pentagon spy documents on Discord and the discovery of fake Chinese police stations used for surveillance in the U.S. The line between espionage and everyday surveillance/data collection is more blurred than ever, thanks to the integration of technology into our daily lives. All of us are walking pieces of data being gobbled up and analyzed by spy agencies around the world. All of this spy news is a reminder of how high the stakes are, and how little we really know about the global fight for information. Audie talks with CNN Anchor and Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto, and former FBI intelligence official Javed Ali about what can spy balloons, leaked documents, and AI tell us about the state of spying today. 

Jim Sciutto is co-anchor of “CNN News Central” weekday afternoons from 1 to 4. His latest book is “The Shadow War: Inside Russia's and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America.” 

Javed Ali is an associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. 

Thanks to the Hayden Center at George Mason University for letting us use audio from their panel on “Counterintelligence Today.” 

Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
It's safe to say that in the era of social media, the spy game has changed. There's more information and information gathering than ever. Some of it in plain sight.
CNN clip 1
00:00:12
"I have no idea what this thing is." A Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States. "What the heck is that?" In a rare Friday night statement, China apologized, saying it was an off course weather balloon.
CNN clip 2
00:00:25
"So first, tell us about the Chinese case- this police station. Explain what was going on." "Yes, well, they- they were operating in the United States office of a regional provincial police station."
CNN clip 3
00:00:39
The documents were posted on Discord, a messaging and chat platform in recent weeks where they resided unknown to the Pentagon until they were picked up and disseminated further.
Audie Cornish
00:00:51
And it used to be that the U.S. intelligence agencies were reluctant to speak publicly about, well, anything.
Alan Koehler clip
00:00:59
There was a time not too long ago where we wouldn't say Russia, China or Iran out loud.
Audie Cornish
00:01:04
But that, too, has changed.
Alan Koehler clip
00:01:07
People need to know what the threats were, who they're coming from, what the vectors are. So we have to change our posture greatly, particularly in the last five years.
Audie Cornish
00:01:16
This is Alan Koehler, assistant director of the counterintelligence division at the FBI. He's speaking in front of a room full of students at George Mason University, for the Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security. Now, the center is named after Michael Hayden. He was once chief of the CIA. The center manages to get a lot of people on stage who typically won't speak publicly, people like Alan Koehler.
Alan Koehler clip
00:01:44
When I got into the FBI working counterintelligence in 96, I was a baby agent in the Washington field office. And I spent most of my time, frankly, chasing Russian intelligence officers around the streets of Washington. And we were very focused on watching people in buildings who were trying to steal US government secrets. And then the Economic Espionage Act was passed in 1996. And there's a realization- probably took us too long to realize it, that, hey, the real secrets that our adversaries want are not necessarily the US government classified secrets. It's not what I have in my safe. It's it's what's in the heads of the engineers that work for, you know, IBM and Apple and Intel. It's what is in the computer drives of these companies.
Audie Cornish
00:02:32
Which means the circle of potential targets for so-called foreign adversaries has gotten wider and wider. From corporations to universities to the entirety of our universe online.
CNN clip 4
00:02:46
Top story, the leak of highly classified Pentagon documents on social media sites. Many apparently reveal key details about Russia's war in Ukraine.
Audie Cornish
00:02:54
So doesn't the U.S. have bigger things to worry about than the occasional spy balloon? Most of us carry a trove of highly revealing personal data in our pockets every day. No balloon required. And if that's all semipublic or hackable, what does it even mean to spy anymore? And how are spy agencies thinking AI could help find the needles in the data haystacks? I'm Audie Cornish. This is the Assignment. For this episode, we're bringing in an expert from the newsroom, anchor and CNN's chief national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto.
Jim Sciutto
00:03:36
I've been in news for, gosh, almost 30 years. Spent the bulk of that as a foreign correspondent overseas in London, in Hong Kong, in Tokyo, and a lot of time traveling the Middle East. And I took a break from news about ten years ago where I served as chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to China.
Audie Cornish
00:03:53
This year alone, he's reported on not just the Chinese spy balloon, but the classified document leaks on Discord, and The Wall Street Journal reporter jailed in Russia for alleged spying. Now, Jim has agreed to swap notes with Javed Ali, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, and he's worked at several of the biggest intelligence agencies in the U.S., including the FBI.
Javed Ali
00:04:15
I spent 26 years in Washington. Of that time, 16 years in the trenches inside the government in a number of different roles in intelligence and counterterrorism. And then the last- my last full year of service from 2017 to 2018, I was a senior director for counterterrorism on the Trump National Security Council.
Audie Cornish
00:04:38
Javed and Jim have been part of the intelligence world for so long that when they saw the spy balloon story from back in February- wasn't a shock. Although they agreed that the political criticism over the Biden administration letting it drift from Montana to South Carolina before shooting it down was not entirely unearned. So I had to start by asking, is the U.S. still good at this?
Jim Sciutto
00:05:00
Well, clearly, U.S. intelligence agencies make a lot of mistakes, there's no question. But they also still do- they're still able to penetrate. Right? So, you know, even in in a technological environment where there's constant change and and doors you used to be able to go through are no longer- are now closed. They're finding ways around it, right. Because they're getting decent reads. Or if you look even more recently, you know, there's a reason Bill Burns, CIA director, went public to say, "China, we know you're considering giving arms to Russia and Ukraine." They clearly developed some intelligence picture of Chinese communications and decision making there. We don't know how, but they did.
Javed Ali
00:05:39
I mean, I would still argue the U.S. is the best in the world. China can pull some different levers because they're author- they're an authoritarian country. Right. And they can mobilize resources against different topics in a way that's harder for us. So, you know, it's hard for me as an outsider now to to know, you know, is this an apples to oranges type of comparison? You know, is China qualitatively ahead of us when it comes to some of these intelligence functions or capabilities? Or are we matching them, but we just don't talk about it? And, you know, that could also be part of the reality. You know, one of these interesting stories that has come out over the last couple of weeks are these illegal Chinese police stations that are operating not only here in the U.S., but also other parts of the world. I have to believe those have been collection platforms as well. Right?
Audie Cornish
00:06:29
These are kind of- exactly what it sounds like. It's a police station that kind of no one knows where it's come from, what it's doing there. And all of a sudden people realize that, hey, wait a second, who's actually running this?
Jim Sciutto
00:06:42
Well, it's also listen, there are kinds of collection- China in these in this station in New York was monitoring its own people so that it could go after dissidents abroad, instill fear in them. You know, and that's part of that's part of an international strategy. They collect intelligence for business purposes to to a degree that the U.S. intelligence agencies, just not. They they steal- they steal business secrets for economic advantage. And and then the other piece is just a massive collection operation on individuals across the world, you and me, you and me included in that to to look at patterns, develop a picture of the U.S. population, potential targets, a whole host of reasons that they're gathering. I am 100% certain you and I,Javed, have files in China. You know, but I wouldn't be surprised if Audie does too, as a journalist. And and our kids.
Audie Cornish
00:07:34
Let me let zero in on that then, because we started out talking about collection. So you guys are using this word fast and loose, like we all know what it is. What does it mean in this day and age to do data collection? One example of collection to me is spy balloon. Yeah, spy balloon looks, collects, sends back what's what's another kind of collection?
Javed Ali
00:07:58
Yeah. We've got information that is communicated by human beings, right? So you've got a human to human conversation about something that's important to a government intelligence agency. And a human being is passing that information. That is traditionally called human intelligence. That is a discipline. Another discipline is called signals intelligence. And that sounds like what it is, any kind of electronic signal that gets emitted, whether it's from a phone or an email or computer. That is what agencies like the National Security Agency are are focused on, you know, that collection of signals slash electronic intelligence. We have other parts of our intelligence community that are interested in trying to understand what is happening at the terrestrial level of the earth. And that is where an agency like the NGA, the National Geospatial Agency, you know, they run the sort of satellites up in the sky and are looking at, what is this activity on the ground and how can you measure change over time by looking, you know, capturing these images on the ground? And then we've come a long way over the past few years, certainly when I was in government and as I was leaving government, trying to make sense of how much information is just out there in the open world, that you don't have to use some clandestine capability to acquire. Whether it's Internet based, social media-
Audie Cornish
00:09:15
And that's relatively new. Right? That's your kind of post-2006 smartphone era social media platform, sea of words, that you somehow have to-
Javed Ali
00:09:27
But the volume of that information- yeah, the volume of that information is staggering. And this is to me, one of the big challenges for not only our intelligence community, but pretty much any other country is like there's so much information in this social media slash Internet world. How do you make sense of it? How do you like how do you figure out what's most relevant to you from a national security perspective? That's really hard and I don't even think we're there yet from a like a capacity perspective.
Audie Cornish
00:09:53
And that information, it's just out there in an open information society like our own. Right?
Jim Sciutto
00:09:59
Not all just out there because there there's also the hacking element to this. I always say to folks that I was a target of four of China's biggest hacks, and therefore that stuff is on a file somewhere.
Audie Cornish
00:10:12
What is that stuff?
Jim Sciutto
00:10:13
I'll give you- so Anthem hacked. Anthem is your health insurance. All that information mine, my wife's, my kids. When you've been sick, where you've seen a doctor sitting on a file somewhere on the dark web. Equifax hacked. That's your financial information. The information you gave to get your home mortgage, your auto loan, etc., that's out there and that that can speak to income, but also potential vulnerabilities if you're a spy service. "Oh, these guys are missing their payments" or something like that, right? The OPM hack. Office of Personnel Management, which affect anybody who's worked for government. This is a few years ago, traced to China, I believe. And that's a whole host of things. Social Security numbers, where you've ever traveled overseas, all on your file. And then the other one I mentioned, it sounds kind of silly, but Marriott, the Marriott Hotels app significant to folks who serve in government because that-
Audie Cornish
00:11:01
And also I notice everyone at CNN is obsessed with their Marriott points. So I think also here.
Jim Sciutto
00:11:07
It's popular in government because the hotels tend to be within the U.S. government limit per night and that gives to travel patterns. So if you're an intelligence service and you want to figure out if Audie Cornish- is she actually the cultural attache at the embassy or do her travel patterns match someone who is more likely an intel operator or something like that?
Audie Cornish
00:11:24
Yeah.
Jim Sciutto
00:11:25
That whole picture obtained by hacks goes beyond what's what's public, what you've posted on Facebook, social media, etc., goes into a vat of information, which I am sure China has highly collated. And then there's a reason folks in intelligence told me years ago, never use TikTok and don't let your kids use TikTok. Tracks your movement, facial recognition technology. So when you think of collection you have like the stuff you used to think about. When I was in China, I know that there was a camera and microphone in my apartment there because my mother in law was in the apartment when the guys came in in uniform and changed the battery. So I know that they did that kind of old school collection that- when my wife and I communicated in Beijing, we did not talk business in the in the building. That's old school that makes you think of, you know, a 1980s film. The other stuff is the stealing your other information via the via the internet to then further create this file. That's collection.
Audie Cornish
00:12:20
Javed, do you have a similar experience?
Javed Ali
00:12:23
Well, I was never posted overseas. My career was in Washington, but I did travel all over the world in different times of my government career for much shorter stints.
Audie Cornish
00:12:34
So give me an example. Because I go into the airport and I've just got like my earbuds in. What are you doing differently?
Javed Ali
00:12:41
Well, I'm just keeping a low profile. Now, this is back when I was in government, right? So, yeah, keep a low profile. Never sort of wear any clothing that would suggest that I do work for, you know, U.S. government.
Audie Cornish
00:12:53
So Javed Ali: traveling in sweats, basically.
Javed Ali
00:12:56
Exactly right.
Audie Cornish
00:12:57
What else?
Javed Ali
00:12:57
I would never I would never talk to people in the airports or on the planes. I would just kind of be in my own space. Wherever I had to go when I rolled off an airplane, you know, in a foreign country, I would just go either to the embassy or the hotel. And but, you know, again, there could have been people physically observing me or some potential attempt of electronic surveillance, but I never let it really affect me for the most part. And as far as I know, like, I never no one ever really interfered with me.
Audie Cornish
00:13:27
Are there ways that you behave here in the U.S. that are different from the average person because of what you know?
Javed Ali
00:13:32
One thing that I have certainly done over the past couple years, limited my social media presence almost to the point of not having one. And maybe that's just a function of getting older. Like, what does a middle aged man need have a Facebook account for? But outside of that, like I don't have any other social media presence. And that's just kind of a personal decision. It's just-
Jim Sciutto
00:13:55
Yeah, U.S. government officials on visits to China will leave their personal phones on on the plane or not bring them with him or bring a a burner or something that doesn't have their personal information and so on, or that they're not bringing back to the U.S. because the assumption is- I mean, listen, when I left China, I took my phone to a to a folks who do this kind of thing to just make sure there wasn't any software living on there that I wasn't aware of. You know, those steps are standard now.
Audie Cornish
00:14:24
And just to be clear about why a country or foreign actor would want this information, as you said, it's to kind of identify potential people who may be doing counterintelligence against them. But it's all using information that's, as you said, hackable or semipublic. Does it negate spying?
Javed Ali
00:14:44
No, it's just an adjunct to it. Right? You're always trying to gather as much information as you can, whether you can do it clandestinely or whether you can do it through hacking or whether you can, again, pull it down from the open source world. The intelligence agencies will always try to gather as much information as they can through these different disciplines, different means. But then you still have to go through the really hard work. And I say this as a former analyst, of making sense of all that data, because there's no point in having data just for the sake of having data. And I used to say this when I was in government and certainly in the counterterrorism world, it's great that we can collect all this information, but we're not actioning it against the right sort of issues and we're not doing the right things with that information that we've acquired either clandestinely or in the open domain, then now becomes a liability.
Jim Sciutto
00:15:31
And one thing we know China is doing is that they are not just mining. They're they're putting this data into a to a construct to try to extract value and patterns and so on, that they've the number of people dedicated to this task is is just remarkable. It's off the charts and, and it's why as you discuss things like artificial intelligence and who's winning you know winning the race in AI and other emerging technologies that all fits into this picture.
Audie Cornish
00:15:58
Javed, can you jump on that? What impact could AI have in spy games?
Javed Ali
00:16:04
Well, I think it already has. Because the volume of information that the intelligence community has already is so vast, we cannot sort of analyze our way out of this or through that with human beings or- the human mind can only comprehend so much data at any one given time. And I struggled with that as an analyst myself in the sort of good old days of the early 2000 where we weren't sort of inundated as much as probably analysts are now. So now this is where technology really has to come into play to help make sense of all these-
Jim Sciutto
00:16:32
Think about political tendencies, right? Someone who has who is either posted online or is in a chat group that that has espoused sympathy for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Right. I mean, you start to find folks, hey, maybe we could work with this person. Maybe they have- or I mean, if you think of this most recent leaker, oh, here's a kid who likes to show off what he knows. Let's see if we can-
Audie Cornish
00:16:57
On a Discord channel.
Jim Sciutto
00:16:58
On a Discord channel, right.
Audie Cornish
00:16:59
But then you got to find the Discord channel. Like how? That that's the needle in the haystack.
Jim Sciutto
00:17:03
Folks, I talked to in intelligence in the wake of this leak will grant that is a black box. Largely. Those are closed circles. They're not like monitoring Facebook or Twitter or something like that. They- you don't know what what's being talked about and shared in those circles. So what do you do about it?
Javed Ali
00:17:21
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the whole social media aspect of or connection to people who are in the intelligence business or the national security world, I mean, again, that is a vulnerability that got exploited through the Discord leak. Perhaps it's now the time for folks who've got security clearances, certainly at the highest levels at the top secret SCI world to you have to provide mandatory reporting of your social media accounts or your activity at some level, because there is no other way to know what people are doing in that space.
Jim Sciutto
00:17:53
We have an open society, right? We have we have a free press.
Audie Cornish
00:17:58
But can you ever stay ahead if everything you're doing is out there all the time? Javed, you must have had to like, talk about this when you were in office.
Javed Ali
00:18:06
Well, I don't think that, you know, yes, we've had leaks and yes, there have been these unauthorized disclosures, but it's not it hasn't compromised, you know, everything that the US government does. You know, the sort of the sort of the game that gets played is when these, you know, unfortunate events happen. If these leaks happened, then you got to go into damage control. You try to sort of mitigate the the losses to the sources and methods or any insights that our adversaries might have. But the day to day work sort of continues. And, you know, that's the strength of the intelligence community, is that we can even in the aftermath of a significant leak or a breach, that, you know, it doesn't you know, it doesn't grind everything to a halt. I guess that's the the best way of thinking about it.
Audie Cornish
00:18:49
And it doesn't- it's not a setback.
Javed Ali
00:18:51
It is. But again, you know, we're it's a resilient intelligence community and there are all these different disciplines and collection capabilities. And so even in the aftermath of something is- and I would argue the Snowden leaks were far more damaging than than the Discord leaks that, you know, the community was able to to bounce back from that and and recover. One thing that I think has been really fascinating over the past year to watch, and Jim I think you and others have reported on this, is that the Biden administration has very deliberately used what must have been very sensitive intelligence to make the case publicly about different aspects of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine or even China, as Jim mentioned before. And every time they have done that, there has probably been some risk to the sources and methods that derive that intelligence in the first place.
Jim Sciutto
00:19:42
Just a devil's advocate point here, because closed systems like Russia and China without open societies have an advantage to some degree, right? You don't have a free press kind of digging for information. You don't have officials who are willing to speak about this, you know, on background, etc.. On the flip side, we saw in in Putin's Russia that he got bad information. Right? That his own intelligence chiefs and military leaders were were too scared to tell him the truth about the weakness of Russian forces or perhaps the strength of Ukrainian forces, or they just didn't know. But there's a lot of evidence that they didn't want to report up the chain and that, it seems, you can argue, contributed to bad decision making by Russia so that the closed systems, it's not like they have have a magic wand for for getting this right either necessarily.
Audie Cornish
00:20:27
Earlier, you guys identified the sheer volume of information and figuring out how to identify stuff and then figure out what you actually act on, what you have to go after. That's one big challenge. What's another big challenge going forward?
Jim Sciutto
00:20:43
One big challenge is that we are you know, the post-Cold War period is over, that this sort of relative detente between the U.S. and the West and Russia and a cooperative, generally cooperative or at least not openly hostile relationship with China that's over. And that you you now you have the genuine- first of all, you have the largest war in Europe since World War Two with the U.S. and the West on one side and Russia on the other. You have other proxy wars kind of developing in different places. And then in China, you have a potential flashpoint in Taiwan. And therefore all the intelligence collection that goes around those things. And just a general decline in those relationships that we are in a you know, it's a return to great powers. It's what I'm writing a book about it now, but I'm not the only one talking about it where you now have two superpower rivals. And that's going to play out on a number of fronts.
Audie Cornish
00:21:34
Meaning the U.S. has two superpower rivals.
Jim Sciutto
00:21:37
The U.S. and its allies with Russia and China. And that's going to play out in the intelligence sphere.
Javed Ali
00:21:41
Yeah, there are a number of challenges. And to pick up on Jim's point, the evolving threat landscape is a major challenge because when I was in government and certainly in the intelligence community, we sort of hyper focused on counterterrorism for the bulk of my career. And that's where most of the policy attention was. That's where a-
Audie Cornish
00:22:00
Lot of the post-9-11 focus on the Middle East and on-
Javed Ali
00:22:04
And South Asia. Right. And now the world has changed. And beyond even these regional issues, we have to deal with climate change and COVID and all the, you know, cybersecurity things that in my career we were just not as sort of nimble on it. And now how do you scale up the intelligence community to deal with these types of, you know, very different issues that are going to require tailored intelligence responses as well? And then I think there are issues with technology, and technology is moving way too fast. It's hard for the intelligence community to keep up with that. And part and parcel, there are workforce issues. You know, the majority- there is going to be a a bulge of people leaving the intelligence community probably in the next 5 to 10 years. And there has to be this next generation of people coming in to make sure the mission, you know, there are no gaps in the mission as things are changing and bringing in this next generation of folks who may have a different profile than people like Jim or I when we had clearances or, you know, were in government, that's going to be a challenge, too, because the community is going to have to take some more risk.
Audie Cornish
00:23:11
Well, thank you both for speaking with us.
Jim Sciutto
00:23:13
Thank you. This was great.
Javed Ali
00:23:14
Yeah. Thanks, Audie.
Audie Cornish
00:23:19
That was Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. And Jim Sciutto is CNN's chief national security correspondent and co-host of News Central. That's weekday afternoons from 1 to 4. Audio at the top of the show is courtesy of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security at George Mason University. That's it for this episode of The Assignment. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. Our producers are Madeleine Thompson, Jennifer Lai, Lori Galaretta, Carla Javier and Dan Bloom. Our associate producers are Isoke Samuel and Allison Park. Our senior producers are Matt Martinez and Haley Thomas. Mixing in Sound Design by David Schulman. Dan Dzula is our technical director. Steve Lickteig is our executive producer. And special thanks to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.