Well, you've alluded to information and data several times, so let's talk data. Sure. What different types of data and there are so many, but what are some of the priority types of data and information that are essential when we're thinking about national security, including counter-terrorism and defense and cybersecurity, all of those things. What matters in terms of data? Yeah, the data issue is so important for national security, but we have to look within each functional issue or regional issue to understand what data is most relevant to that because not all data is equal. If you start looking at the wrong set of data on a certain topic or issue, you may not find the threats that you're actually looking for, and again, this was something that counter-terrorism really had to adjust to after 9/11. The aperture for acquiring data got massively bigger after 9/11 and you needed it. The growth of social media like Zoom. Exactly. Both on the classified and the unclassified side, and that continues to be one of these challenges just for counter-terrorism, forget about all the other national security priorities. When I was in some of these government positions, I saw that wave starting to hit us and I thought, if we as the Intelligence Committee anyways, don't start trying to get ahead of these data challenges we have either on the classified side or the publicly available side, I would argue social media fits in there, then more threats will happen and we will lose our ability to stop them. The classified data problem is one problem. Traditionally, the intelligence community, again, another one is cultural should rely on just we're only going to understand the world through the lens of whatever classified information we have, whether it's technical information, imagery from a satellite, information that's derived from a human source. These are all the different types of classified data that you have to sift through, but now we've got this much bigger pool of publicly available information, which a lot of it resides in the social media world and how do you bring those two worlds together and fuse these two completely different types of data into a common approach that let's former analysts like myself when I started my career, identify threats before attacks happen. That's the ultimate goal to keep the American public safe either at home and abroad and prevent attacks from happening, but I think there's more challenges is more data now. There's less ability to figure out what that data means and then how do you ingest it in a way that's timely, it's actionable, and makes sense, and these are all things that are still ongoing challenges for us. Right. Do you have an example of maybe that you can share? Sure. Some classified data, but an example of a routine report you would get in one of your jobs. Well, maybe a better example is the social media challenge for the least that asks and probably other countries on the national security space. Again, the traditional focus of the intelligence media is to collect the classified intelligence, but there's so much of national security-relevant information in the social media world and I think one of the challenge is how much of it is relevant? What can you legally acquire? Certainly, in the United States, we have constitutional protections on what information that's publicly available can the police, the intelligence community collect, and then what do you do with it even if you have it. A good example of how a foreign adversary has managed to exploit this social media domain against the United States was the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, where they basically using different elements of their government cutouts like the Internet Research Agency basically lead a really strong disinformation and misinformation campaign and the run-up to the 2016 elections for President Trump and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. At the time when these social media-driven campaigns were happening, the US government didn't know which of these accounts were willing to the Russian proxies or Internet Research Agency or not. One of the things we still don't know the answer to is from that social media activity, how much of an effect did it have on influencing people's perceptions of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to the actual boat with the fact this activity was happening in real-time, no one knew what was happening in real-time, or at least the Russian component of it. Then potentially having a significant effect on the elections. That isn't an incredible case study on how foreign adversary has used social media in plain sight without our ability to understand what was really happening and that'll probably continue to happen in elections going forward. We're in a very uplifting conversation here. I'm never the bearer of good news, unfortunately. Now, this is such an important aspect of the work in the public sector. Again, as we've been talking about, it's such an important public good. Right. Only the government is going to be taking on this role of trying to understand threats and challenges to national security. For people who are thinking about and interested in careers as data analysts and policy analysts for governments in their countries and also for subdivisions within countries, but especially in the area of national security and defense and counter-terrorism, what are your recommendations? My recommendation would be yes, lean forward into those positions if those opportunities exist, build the skills you can acquire either on the academic side or on the professional side, but at least within the US, we need more of those types of people, whether they're young, mid-career. But because of these challenges that we've talked about on the information and data analytics side, this is part of our national security workforce that is still woefully underrepresented. I think it's safe to say it is everywhere. But certainly in the national security community. As I was leaving government in 2018 to start teaching here, these were a series of positions that some of my former departments and agencies were trying to hire into, and even trying to hire a handful of people became very difficult either because we couldn't find the people with the right skills and the right experience, or we found those people but they had tremendously better offers from a private sector company where they could triple or quadruple their salary. They didn't have to get a government security clearance and get a lie detector test, to get drug tests at all. You have to make some lifestyle choices too at least for the US side if you're going to aim in that world. There's a number of, I think barriers to entry that are making this hard and this is another one of these trade-offs, at least on the government side, people are going to have to perhaps take more risks on. You may not be able to get a candidate who's able to get passed through all of these security checks before you get in, but they have the hard skills, and what's more important, making sure that someone has a hard skills first versus some lower level security concerns because of if we keep defaulting to when someone has to pass all of these security checks first, we're never going to fill these positions. The skills matter. Exactly. Skills absolutely matter. Right. Well, I know we could spend hours more literally talking about all these important issues, but thank you so much for sharing a bit of your time with us today to just talk a little bit more about the important role of data and information in the incredibly important area of national security. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you, Paula.
