Jane DOE: The following podcast was released in 2021 on a separate platform. IC leadership thought leadership, titles, current events, and technology may have changed and evolved since its original release.

Dr. Deb Pfaff: … the Intelligence Community doesn't tell its own story. We let others do that for us. We let Hollywood tell it. We let journalists tell it. We let Congress tell it. We don't speak up and actually talk about what it is that we do and why we do it and how we do it and how that benefits the Intelligence Community and the public good that is national security.

Dr. Bo: So, what we do isn't unique to us anymore, is another part of what we need to think about as we try to engage in a different way and more fully with the American public - many of whom would be more interested in what we did and have a different perspective on what we do and how we operate if they had more information.

Jane DOE: The opinions and views expressed in the following podcast do not represent the views of NIU or any other U.S. government entity. They are solely the opinions and views of Jane DOE and her guests. A mention of organizations, publications, or products not owned or operated by the U.S. government is not a statement of support and does not constitute U.S. government endorsement.

Welcome back to the Intelligence Jumpstart podcast. I am your host, Jane DOE.

On this episode, Chris V., NIU research faculty member and the director of NIU’s Center for Intelligence Extremis, moderated a timely and fascinating discussion with NIU faculty members and co-directors of the NIU Center for Truth, Trust, and Transparency, also known as TR3.

Dr. Deb Pfaff and Dr. Bo discuss truth, trust, and transparency, and what they mean for the Intelligence Community, their impact and value for democracy, and the challenges that these three pillars of our society are facing especially today.

Chris V.: I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to having this discussion with our two experts, Deb, and Bo, on such a hot and timely topic. I'm just going to jump right in and to kick off, what is TR3? What is its purpose? And why now?

Dr. Deb Pfaff: Thanks, Chris. And hello, everyone. It is an absolute pleasure to be here. I'm so happy to be talking about this stuff. Chris, to answer your question. U.S. national security depends upon public information, support, and understanding. But the public has been essentially left to form its own impressions of the IC based on movies, novels, television, reporting, computer games, you know, journalism, you name it. Our proposed center, TR3, is trying to help frame the problem with related issues and generate some insights on how we can address some of these growing challenges. We'd also really like to provide the ODNI with fresh ideas to try to strengthen some of the bonds between citizens and the Intelligence Community.

So, we seek to explore the Intelligence Community's complex changing relationship with the public. They've relied on us for national security, but they really just don't know how they come to enjoy that public good. And citizens are now an integral part of the national security mission, and we have a responsibility to bring them into the fold. So, our proposed TR3 Center's mission is to address and help rectify misconceptions, biases, and ignorance in how the American public is informed about the work and image of the Intelligence Community. And our vision is to undertake and sponsor research, encouraging and supporting the creation of a comprehensive IC-wide strategy for engaging the public - of course, within the accepted national security limits.

And you ask why now. I think the question there is really, why not before. This is not a new problem. This is something the Intelligence Community has dealt with since its inception. In fact, in 1976, William Colby wrote that both exposure and secrecy are essential to a truly free society. But we must achieve a new theory of secrecy appropriate to our new society of instant communication, universal education, and mass opinion.

So, the public now has access to information they just didn't have before. And this can be pretty detailed information from legitimate sources that can provide accurate insight into the inner functioning of our government. And that information could be wholly true. But it's not something that the public has heard before, and therefore, it just might not sit well with them, because they're unfamiliar with how the government has operated all this time. That's a very valid conversation. And that's one that we need to have with the American public we serve.

The information they receive also maybe from illegitimate sources from individuals or entities that don't have the facts or are portraying them disingenuously. And this dramatically increases the pressure because now we've got to convince the public of the truth as well as get them accurate information before we can even begin to have that very valid conversation that belongs within the democratic discourse or country deserves and that we depend upon.

All of those pressure points have been further intensified through unauthorized disclosures by individuals with a wanton disregard for protecting information that doesn't belong in the public focus. And here, I'm talking about information that will cause damage to our country if it ends up in the hands of our enemies. These are folks like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. And they have made constructive dialogue even more challenging by haphazardly releasing a million pages of documents on programs that they didn't even bother to take the time to read, much less evaluate.

So, as government employees with the national security clearance - we have a responsibility to follow proper procedures to report suspected waste, fraud, and abuse. And it wasn't that Snowden and Manning weren't satisfied by the outcome of their efforts using legitimate processes. They just didn't bother to follow those processes at all. So, suddenly the public has all this insider knowledge that they've never had before - without the necessary context to evaluate it. And the IC doesn't have the reputation and the trust it needs to assuage public concern.

We've ignored this problem because quite frankly, we're terrified to question one of our fundamental assumptions - and that is that the value of the Intelligence Community is secrecy. Secrecy has become not just a method, not just how we do something, but also literally what we do. Many, probably even most people in the IC truly believe that our greatest asset is access to information that others don't have. And I really disagree. I disagree not only because that paradigm is shifting rapidly - as the entire world begins to have access to these, these data streams that just weren't previously available. But also, because we have, we have something very few private entities can lay claim to - and that's objectivity. Our bottom line isn't money, it's decision advantage to policymakers. And our stakeholders aren't a corporate board. They're the American public.

Chris V.: I guess to summarize, the velocity, the volume and the veracity of messages that roll into data with and regular basis, can easily and usually, drown out a more authoritative voice or position coming from the government. And now, we're more challenged than we were maybe back in 1976 when Kobe first made his statement. So, what you portray really sounds like a crisis, to me, it sounds urgent. Is the crisis the Intelligence Community is facing any different than the crisis the rest of government or even corporate America is facing? And let me be more specific. I'm referring to the crisis of dis or misinformation and the challenge of building trust and credibility in this environment.

Dr. Deb Pfaff: So yes, and no, and I'll start with no first. The world is facing unprecedented complexity, it's unbelievably difficult to predict the effect any one event big or small is going to have, and this is increased uncertainty. We as humans, as a species, we are terrible at dealing with uncertainty. So even if all this information that we have is factually accurate, and it's not, we can't possibly process it quickly or comprehensively enough to make any type of sense out of it. So, and if all these vast amounts of data were enough to completely overwhelm us, and our human distaste for uncertainty, now, we actually have to worry about the veracity and information of the data itself, as well as the motivations of the source or the provider of information.

So, you mentioned misinformation and disinformation. And misinformation is something that every human contends with just by virtue of being human, it's a form of confirmation bias that assigns credibility solely to information or interpretation that already agrees with what we are comfortable believing in. So, our brains are struggling to make sense of all these competing data streams. And as we were searching more and more for clarity, we often end up with a sense that I am never going to be able to master this topic. So, I'm just going to give up because trying to search is just getting me turned around in circles and questioning what I was questioning before. So, fall back on my preexisting beliefs.

And then there's disinformation. And that's the rapid spread of false or misleading info, with the actual intent to deceive. This is a problem for the Intelligence Community in the same way, it's a problem for the rest of humanity. We have to parse through all this crap that someone with mal intent wants us to believe, in order to try to figure out what the actual story is. But it's also a problem for the IC in a slightly different way than your average corporation - foreign and domestic actors use disinformation to drive their own agendas, whether it's supporting a particular political position or undermining confidence in the government or national security. And in this sense, the Intelligence Community and the government has a reputation problem. And you know, not to mention, thanks to the term of the use prediction that the public thinks that the Intelligence Community has a crystal ball, and anything that isn't delivered with exact accuracy constitutes a failure.

So, the public doesn't know what to believe. And their attention is being consumed by a total excess of data and a low ratio of signals to noise. And put another way, there's not enough of the good stuff, and there's way too much of the crap. Unlike your average corporation, the public can't boycott national security doesn't have that option. So, whereas other brands have issues with reputation or experience a crisis like Tylenol did when their product was tampered with in the 80s, or McDonald's did when they eliminated the supersize meals - the Intelligence Community doesn't tell its own story. We let others do that for us. We let Hollywood tell it, we let journalists tell it, we let Congress tell it. We don't speak up and actually talk about what it is that we do and why we do it and how we do it and how that benefits the Intelligence Community and the public good that is national security.

So, since the IC’s interaction with the public is limited, and quite frankly, they're very suspicious of us - the public receives this information through a filter if they get bad information from multiple unreliable sources, which actually is quite ironic, given the value the Intelligence Community places on sourcing, and they have no means of accessing actual viable information from the primary source, which is the Intelligence Community even if they wanted to.

Chris V.: So, how - how does the Intelligence Community build trust given all this disinformation or reputation issues and distrust? How does the Intelligence Community build trust when the mission is based around or cloaked in secrecy?

Dr. Bo: Chris, I think to begin with the question, as its worded is a bit flawed. Because the IC’s the Intelligence Community's mission is not based around secrecy. Its mission is, first and foremost, to provide the best timely and most useful information with which to assist policymakers who are dealing with foreign affairs and national and homeland security decisions. What is secret is how the IC the Intelligence Community acquires and analyzes, in part, some of what it collects and makes available. Therefore, our concern is principally the methods and sources that we use, particularly when they're covert or clandestine, that we believe demand secrecy in their execution and secrecy in their output.

The issues, as Deb mentioned, that we confront or dispel these ideas that are fed by fiction movies, mistaken perspectives, that all of intelligence is rooted in secrecy, in spying, intruding on other sovereignty - perhaps civil rights and constitutional protection violations. That's a view that is too widely held and one that is quite simply not accurate.

What the Intelligence Community needs to address now, in our view, is how to correct that misapprehension, without endangering that element of our work, our modus operandi, that can only be successful if it remains hidden. One of the things that occurs to most of us who have been in this Intelligence Community business for a long time, is the tendency to blame intelligence when there is an alleged failure of some kind. And at the same time, unlike businesses, which you refer to corporate America earlier, we can't advertise we can't even disclose most of our successes. Because to do so is to lose the opportunity to repeat those successes. And loss of the kind of sourcing kind of methods are uniquely ours - are the uniquely those at least of intelligence agencies.

Another part of this, it seems to me is that democracies actually don't like secrets. Kolby heads some of this in his rather poignant comment. But the ability of and the well-being of democracies to sustain themselves, still also depends in part on knowing more about potential threats to the United States and its security than what can be learned openly and appear to be apparent. We've had very recent examples of this in Afghanistan, tragically. But this kind of thing has typified the Intelligence Community's tasks and dilemmas ever since we went into the business intelligence a century or so ago.

So, the kinds of things that we worry about, obviously, are foreign powers with mass destruction, weapons, terrorist groups with malevolent plans, as we have seen with ISIS-K, most recently. Countries trying to hide situations can make them really affect their publics and others. Such as some countries trying to actually hide the outbreak of COVID-19, the pandemic that we're now suffering.

I think too many people in the public tend to think that transparency is essentially something that is missing from the IC. They tend to see the IC the Intelligence Community as a secret monolith - that, despite its massive size, and huge budget, often seems, to the public and policymakers, congressional and others - to get it wrong too often and to get it too late.

For a long time, issues surrounding 911 - there was much made of this cliche of putting the puzzle together. My own sense is that this is the kind of thing that if you asked the public what a puzzle looks like, whether it's 300 pieces are 1000. Somehow or other, they all fit together, and they match the picture on the box. The problem with the Intelligence Community's challenges is there is no picture on the box. And that it seems to me is something that the public has a tendency to miss, misunderstand misperceive.

So, for years, going back at least a Pearl Harbor, through the fall of the Soviet Union, to the 911 attack that I just mentioned - and now the chaotic conditions in the Afghan military and government collapse and refugee flows. These are things that even if the Intelligence Community anticipates them, it's too hard for us to anticipate them absolutely, precisely. And we've seen an example of that most recently in the folding, basically, of the Afghan armed forces.

Another element in this transparency issue that we hope to try to get a better understanding of is that even when we do get something right in the intelligence world, as we very often do - one example to me that is quite apparent was our anticipation of the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia. The fact is that until that kind of information is released, or at least in part of released from the archives, 30 years have passed. Only the historians are going to be able to say, “Oh, they did get it right.” When most of the people who worked on it are either in retirement or are on the wrong side of the grass.

We have a Freedom of Information Act but, that's only a partial remedy for unmet demands for transparency. And as the record would show, very often, even a response to a Freedom of Information Act request, has a good part of the sensitive information redacted or blacked out. The dilemma remains. Let me give you a quick example. I teach a course on dealing with foreign intelligence agencies, and even an unclassified version of a 1950s, early 1960s history of CIA, which was heavily edited, has a chapter on liaison dealing with these foreign intelligence agencies. The only thing that appears in the chapter that has not been blacked out is that word, liaison. Everything else has been obliterated.

This is the kind of thing that leads me to believe that we need to figure out ways to move from what has long been inside the Intelligence Community, a policy, and a culture of total risk avoidance, to a much more meaningful, but still difficult task of working our way into policy and an approach of risk management.

Chris V.: That was a really great answer. And there's so much in there to digest. I'd say maybe three points in there that really resonated with me were: Secrecy is not the goal. Secrecy is a critical, essential element of the Intelligence Community’s work - but it's not the goal. Another one is that when we are successful, you don't hear about it. And what you usually hear about in the press are operational successes and intelligence failures. So, when things are going well the Intelligence Community is conspicuously missing in the press.

And the last point that I really liked that you brought up was that concept, that idea of risk avoidance balanced against risk management. That sounds like a tender, delicate subject that everyone the intelligence community has to deal with, in some way, shape, or form every day. So, thanks that was a great answer.

The Intelligence Community is big and has tremendous resources, it brings to a wide variety of problems. And so, someone, anyone might imagine, or wonder, what's being done already, and by whom?

Manolis Priniotakis: I’m Manolis Priniotakis, NIU’s Vice President for Research & Infrastructure and this is this episode’s Manolis Minute.

The next episode you’ll hear features Cathy Hackl, known as the godmother of the metaverse.
The idea of the metaverse is one of those things that has envisioned for quite some time but now looks like the technology has caught up with the idea to make it something of a reality. It follows such ideas as cloning and space travel.

One of the more notable early mentions of something like a metaverse (to including coining the term metaverse) came in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which describes a virtual environment along a single road that runs more than 65,000 kilometers around the circumference of a virtual planet. In the book, visitors get to the metaverse through virtual reality goggles. Sound familiar?
He also envisioned the use of electronic money in the book, what we now know as cryptocurrencies. He carried this theme over into a handful of his books that followed Snow Crash. Perhaps most notably the Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.
As an aside, Stephenson was – according to public records – okay, fine – his Wikipedia page –born at Ft Meade, home of NSA.

There’s possibly a lot to be learned from fiction … and not just science fiction. Defense analyst Peter W. Singer has been arguing for a new intelligence discipline: FICINT … or fiction intelligence … as a way for analysts to better understand what lies ahead.

This isn’t just science fiction. It could be any number of scenarios. It’s a way to think creatively about the future and what could be … just like Stephenson did in Snow Crash.

Thanks again for listening to Intelligence Jumpstart. For more information on NIU, please visit our website, www.ni-u.edu.

Dr. Bo: Let me pick up on some of that again, Chris, because some things are being done. The advent of the position, function, and role of the Director of National Intelligence and her office, and staff that surround her, and help manage the work of the Intelligence Community at large, has a number of things underway, including particular transparency initiative. The Intelligence Community, through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has a webpage. Intel.gov. It publishes on that, something called the Public’s Daily Brief, which is an unclassified, similar type document to what the President of the United States would see every day, in a very highly classified version. But that at least gives the public an opportunity to see some of what the community is doing, some of what it is saying, some of what its priorities are.

Individual agencies in the Intelligence Community, of which there are 18 At this point, are also engaged in a number of other things. And I'll just tick off some examples. Educational Outreach is one of them - involved with curricula and research in universities and think tanks, the work of professional societies, of which there are several, that deal with intelligence, including one that does Intelligence education work. Some agencies are able to sponsor and manage internships. A number of agencies are involved with sending out, both current personnel as well as retirees, most of whom were quite senior in public speaking enterprises. Some of those same people serve as professors of practice in university faculty. And what that actually means is, they don't necessarily have a wealth of academic background, but they have a wealth of experience in the business of intelligence - and to the extent possible, they can talk to some of that.

There are also world affairs councils, throughout the Country, some of which have an intelligence issue and set of issues on their agendas. Obviously, the Intelligence Community in its public affairs offices in these different agencies, does have connections with media, it does grant a limited number of interviews - some of which are on background, some of which are on the record. There is, every year, a public, unclassified threat briefing given to Congress by three or four of the leading personnel in the intelligence business, agency chiefs, including the Director of National Intelligence. The community has published global trends, which is a five-year outlook of things that might be anticipated in terms of the way the world might develop. That is public. That is on the web.

So, there are a number of different things that we are involved with, and the public may not realize this unless they're in college at this point. But a number of universities actually have introduced intelligence studies as part of their curricula, either in the Political Science and Government departments, in some cases as a separate entity.

But there are some challenges with this. And first and foremost, in my mind is we have a lot of things available, but the question is, how limited is that audience? And does the wider audience or even part of that audience realize what's there?

The approach seems to have been largely, we're going to put something together, here it is come and get it - as opposed to how do you generate an approach that will push information out to the public? I mean, we've even toyed with the idea of, you know, Saturday morning cartoons, if you will, or at least that kind of delivery. You get a program like this centered on something in the Public Broadcasting System - which is also not universally looked at, as we know. But is there something that we can do to make our brand, our activity, our way of doing things more proactive, less passive in delivering the reality of the Intelligence Community and its work to a wider into a younger public?

One of the things that has been disconcerting is some polling done by Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs, University of Texas. This is now about four years old, but it shows that we have a largely positive reputation in the US public, but that reputation is also weakest in the youngest age group. It's those millennials who are the least engaged, least convinced that the Intelligence Community respect civil liberties. That's not a good sign. That's not a good trend. That's not where we should be or where we need to be, as I think Deb made clear in her earlier comments.

We know this - what I'm about to say, in fact, but we don't, I think, internalize it all that well or all that often. And that is when the government essentially has a monopoly on information, as it did long before television, sort of in the period of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Okay, a lot of the American public never knew that he was in a wheelchair. No television. You always see him covered up or sitting at a table or something on old newsreels. That monopoly on information, and particularly now on intelligence, even, is history.

There's a world of commercial imagery out there. Who hasn't looked at global Earth? The government even contracts with an outfit, and others like Digital Globe, to get commercial companies to do some of this work. You can even certainly get signals intelligence capabilities. Go out and get something to eavesdrop on another company, or somebody else.

So, what we do isn't unique to us anymore, is another part of what we need to think about as we try to engage in a different way and more fully with the American public - many of whom would be more interested in what we did and have a different perspective on what we do and how we operate if they had more information. And part of what TR3 center is intending to do is find and figure out ways to do that.

Chris V.: So, despite the issues you brought up, much of this sounds very reassuring. And I know in my own experience that the Office of Director of National Intelligence within ODNI, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the policy and capabilities folks, and the National Counterterrorism Center regional reps, all put tremendous time and effort into building public-private relationships. And many of those relationships have been around for a very long time, now.

The next question is pretty loaded, and it requires some unpacking. I’ll approach it from several different angles. But how does the IC become more transparent? So, more specifically than that … what are the nuts and bolts of engaging the public? And what is involved and why is it such a complex issue in the IC?

Dr. Deb Pfaff: So, I’ll grab that one first and then Bo if you want to, you want to follow up with some heat after that, that'd be great.

So, Chris, I think first thing we got to agree that there's a problem. That actually might be our biggest hurdle within the Intelligence Community. Again, Bo mentioned that the IC doesn't have it, its mission isn't secrecy, but we have such an extended relationship with secrecy. We were modeled basically on the Soviet Union. And we were forced to mature rapidly as a means of dealing with them. So, the IC actually grew to mimic the system it was developed to and created to collect on and analyze. And we eventually evolved into this very closed, linear system, which our colleague, Josh Kerbel has written about at length.

US wasn't alone. This was not something that was just akin to us. Many other countries - Austria, Britain, France, Germany, so on and so forth - all established a permanent intelligence function, way before the United States, and all of them were steeped in collecting and classifying all possible information. So, if we want to change, if we want to actually acknowledge that secrecy is not really our reason for existence - that's going to be antithetical to many, many people. Assuming we can get past that, once we agree there's a reason for transparency, and then we need to agree on a strategy across those 18 Intelligence Community agencies.

This is not something the Intelligence Community is particularly adept at. We often operate as really very separate entities were pitted against one another for resources and budget, for the attention of the policymaker. This has led to some pretty significant stovepipes across the Community, as well as lack of cooperation. One of the things that was noted in the 911 Commission Report, the DNI was created after that in 2004, through the passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, that super awkward acronym, IRTPA. And it oversees the integration of the intelligence functions, but the DNI also lacks some statutory authority. It's also lost more than one public battle to the CIA. So, coming together to craft what amounts to an IC-wide public strategy, which again, as Bo mentioned, is what we're calling for in our center. That's going to be a tremendous internal struggle. And that's going to need to be settled before the real work of increasing our credibility with within the public can actually begin in earnest.

That second problem is going to be complex, simply because of the sheer amount of preconceived notions that the public has formed about the Intelligence Community. Bo mentioned the difference between the millennials and the silent generation and their view of civil liberties, also complex because of something else we've talked about - the misinformation and disinformation. Democracy and democratic discourse require that reasonable humans take the time to learn the facts and debate them. But if those facts themselves are distorted, the results of those debates are likely to be convoluted - I think is a good word for that - and they're certainly not going to be representative of the true state of affairs,

Dr. Bo: I would just add a couple of quick points, and that seems to me that the Intelligence Community has an ingrained culture focused on secrecy, and it has had for a long time. And how you get through that, and over some of that, without violating the required and absolutely necessary protections that are sources and methods demand, remains a big hurdle, it seems to me. And the other thing that we have to keep in mind is in trying to do that, we can't just address ourselves to the American public. If you're addressing yourself to a public, you're addressing yourself now to the globe. You don't have the luxury of picking out this only as intended for U.S. citizens, U.S. ears, whatever. So that adds another level of complexity, when you have to start thinking what bad things could happen out there, if any number of foreign listeners, foreign partakers, were to have this information.

So, I think history has sort of outrun us in the sense of the way the world is developed in a globalization sense, and I'm not sure that we're just slow to catch up. I think we're not yet to the point where we understand fully how to go about this. You asked this question about how we become more transparent, in the nuts and bolts of engaging the public. That's really the aim of this center, in part. And we're not the only ones doing this, by the way. But to get a better picture on what might be some different approaches, some new perspective, and some new avenues to engage the public, without endangering the national security that we all depend on.

Chris V.: It sounds like there's been tremendous progress since IRTPA the creation of ODNI. But stove piping is still a very real issue, and we still have to counterbalance that with the protection of sources and methods. This leads to the next thought ... the next question which is, who should be taking the lead on this?

Dr. Bo: Let me just start really quickly with kind of the book answer if you will. And that is, this really belongs in the domain of the Director of National Intelligence and her staff. The large enterprise that she manages directly, as well as the Intelligence Community as a whole. That doesn't mean that this needs to be a centrally directed enterprise. But the impetus for this should be coming from the DNI, and it has been in this … she included this in her congressional testimony for getting her nomination approved in the Senate.

So, this is not something that is foreign to them, but it's something that tends to be relegated, oftentimes, to that's something for a rainy-day project. That's something that we really need to get to, but in the meantime, we have all these other things coming at us - that demand action, demand collection, that demand support to the President and to the cabinet. And that still remains our first priority - is that reducing the uncertainty that they confront, as they tried to make the best decisions for the Country.

Chris V.: We discussed a lot of important, sometimes enduring issues. And they all merit attention, and resources, and effort, and time. But what are the greatest challenges to the effort, how will you or we, as a Community address them?

Dr. Deb Pfaff: You know, we certainly have discussed a lot of, a lot of challenges, probably a lot more challenges that we have solutions for. So, I think beyond convincing the Intelligence Community that it needs a cultural rebirth, as well as convincing the public that we actually don't have mind-reading capabilities, I think we need to convince or consider the policymakers themselves. I was having a great conversation with Cortney Weinbaum from Rand. She also researches on public relationships with the IC. And we were talking about this last week. Our country's leaders have some tremendously, incredibly weighty topics to contend with at the moment - and not the least of which is the ongoing global pandemic, the cyber threat from Russia and China, great power, competition, climate change, the withdraw from Afghanistan - the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

We have to convince our IC leaders and policymakers that taking time away from these key national interest items, is actually a paramount importance, right now. There's a quote out there, the Chinese character for the word crisis is actually made up of two other characters. One is dangerous, and one is opportunity. I think John F. Kennedy was actually the first one to introduce this. Interestingly enough, that's not the case. The Chinese character for crisis is in fact made up of the Chinese character for danger. But the other is, is not opportunity. The other actually represent a change point where things really start to go awry. It's the point of no return … so to speak. We are at that point. We are at the point where if we don't do something about this, we risk the Intelligence Community's future.

Bo and I actually talked about this in our article, recently published in The Hill, which is entitled the Intelligence Community’s Silence is Deafening. The privatization of the Intelligence Community becomes a very, very real risk. We've already seen elements of this. SpaceX - which was contracted to provide NASA with cargo and crew transport to the International Space Station and has now grown into a $2 billion corporation with 1000 satellites in orbits and designs on Mars. So, we need to get the IC on the same page to craft a strategy, convince the public it can believe in trust us, and also get policymaker attention, to address the concern of privatization. And no one said this is going to be easy. But in order to get these ... these other smart people invited to the conversation, we actually first have to start the conversation. And that's what we're doing right here, now.

Dr. Bo: We don't underestimate the size of the challenge in front of the Intelligence Community. And our idea is not to provide all the answers or even maybe very many answers - but to generate more focus on this whole area of the nexus between the Intelligence Community and its various actors and agencies, and the US public.

Chris V: Both of you provided a bunch of great points. I guess looking at it from another angle, or maybe boiling it down a bit ... not everything can be number one priority. But that doesn't mean that you can turn your back to fast-emerging situations that may become a priority two, or priority one, somewhere down the road. This is really complicated set of situations. We're winding down to the last question. And I really like this question, because it gives us some opportunity to possibly end on a positive note - but I'll leave that up to our experts. What does success look like? What stories do we want to tell the public?

Dr. Bo: Well, Chris, of course, you save the best for last in the sense … and I put that in quotation marks. But that's the $64,000 question, obviously, and the one that this research center aims to confront, as it evolves and deepens our understanding of the public's attitude toward its biases concerning U.S. intelligence.

Let's start with the name we've affixed to the enterprise - Truth, Trust, and Transparency. Truth has been distorted falsified, misrepresented, and challenged in America as never before. One measure of success would be starting to turn the information assurance tied back to what the late Senator Patrick Moynihan said many years ago. Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. If more people would begin to acknowledge that experts actually exist, are often correct in their judgments, and have the informational and the intellectual equipment to generally know more about their own areas of specialization - than does someone without that training and skill set - that would be a help. Noone would go to a mechanic to diagnose and cure an illness any more than you would go to a medical doctor to replace your carburetor. There is a place for expertise. I don't like the word expert, but specialization serves its purpose.

Americans also have a host of inaccurate, inflated, and highly fictionalized notions of intelligence. We talked about that before. They get their images from Ian Fleming, James Bond, John le Carre, Tom Clancy, David Ignatius, and others. Clancy's action hero plus analyst Jack Ryan doesn't exist in the real world. Neither does 007 jumping from rooftop to rooftop to escape an assassin. This makes great film, great readable fiction, but it bears no resemblance to the real thing. Injecting more of that reality, even though it's more banal, perhaps, into this mix of impressions and perspectives might help us.

Espionage, we remind ourselves, is always an illegal act. It remains at the core of intelligence, but intelligence is a great deal more than human agents infiltrating and reporting on adversaries. Indeed, with the passage of time, there's more and more publicly and corporately produced intelligence available for the asking, or for payments. We've already mentioned, global imagery, signals intelligence for anyone, so forth.

Success would also be a factor of being more transparent and widely accessible to those parts of the public that really do care to know more about the Intelligence Community. Perhaps they're even interested in potential careers in intelligence, or at least are willing to have their preconceived notions or biases challenged. That would be another measure of success - I think in our terms. This could range from television exposure to public speaking, to insider media accounts. Enlightening folks with history and insights into icy exploits and so forth.

Admittedly, a balanced picture would have to also discuss the failure to anticipate things like Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, the Arab Spring, the Soviet Union's implosion, 911, and the most recent cataclysmic collapse of the erstwhile government security forces in Afghanistan. Keeping in mind that, in many cases, the Intelligence Community has recognized and reported likely developments only to have policy and decision makers either ignore those or to act on their own impulses - both political and personal. But the other thing is, many of these are first-time events. There is no trend. There is no pattern. And that's one of the things that we always look for. But it's the broken parts of those patterns that provide such strategic surprise and are in fact, the thing that we guard against, as best we can as one of our highest priorities.

Success will be a while in coming, if at all. It will be hard to measure … other than with some public opinion and maybe published opinion monitoring. Despite the American government's infatuation with metrics these days, no one measure or set of them will render a finding of Intelligence Community success. But Deborah and I, and many others, do know, however, is that the stature and reception of the Intelligence Community among the U.S. populace is in need of attention and repair. And without some form of treatment, the Intelligence Community's plight will only worsen. That's our bottom line.

Dr. Deb Pfaff: For my part, I'd love to see a spokesperson for the Intelligence Community, and as something tangible. Similar to the way Fauci is a spokesperson. I also would really love to see a television show that is that is sort of accurately capturing the Intelligence Community and what we do - but I'm afraid that might be tremendously boring, and no one would watch it. Ultimately, I think we won't really know whether we're successful, as Bo points out, metrics are going to be difficult. I think we will absolutely know if we're going to fail.

Chris V.: Once again, there are so many great points in here. I really homed in on Patrick Moynihan’s quote that you offered, Bo. I think it should be well taken, well absorbed, and understood today. Because it just seems like the public is so anxious to accept and acknowledge alternative facts - and to deem things Fake News. It can only lead to dismay and disorder. It's just not going to be a positive thing in the end. But at that, I like to thank you so much, Deb. Bo. We're all looking forward to seeing the great things will come from your center and your research. This has been an enlightening and thought-provoking conversation. Thanks.

Dr. Deb Pfaff: Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Bo.

Dr. Bo: Thanks, folks.

Jane DOE: Thank you for listening to the Intelligence Jumpstart podcast. We'd love to hear from you about what you liked and what you'd like to hear more of. If you would like to hear more about a specific topic or issue, send us a note at NIPress@niu.odni.gov. To learn more about NIU visit our website at NI-U.edu.