RATNAM: You're now the chairman of this new
subcommittee of the House Intelligence
that's overseeing strategic technologies
and advanced research
I want to see if you can frame the challenge that you
face
HIMES: One is, are we adapting and adopting technology within the intelligence
community as rapidly as we need to?
The other challenge of course is doing the
longer-term thinking around threats
that we may not see yet.
The adoption of machine
learning for data processing we're in a
world right now, and after 5G networks
are fully rolled out, we are in a world
where we will be dealing with orders of
magnitude more data than we have today.
And that's a huge challenge to the
intelligence community, if they don't, if
they're not at the forefront of machine
learning and artificial intelligence
they will be swimming in an ocean of
data that they can't begin to parse
RATNAM: One of the other technologies that
chairman Schiff, Adam Schiff the chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee, has
been raising the alarm about is deepfake.
How big of a challenge do you
think that that is?
HIMES:  I think the challenge is a transitional challenge
and it's not one that is new to us
I mean when photographic technology came
out a hundred years ago it was pretty
soon thereafter you could fake a
photograph and so we all grew up knowing
that you could fake a photograph.
Citizens and people need to adapt to
this so, and I think this is happening,
people need to understand that
everything they see on Facebook and
Twitter is not necessarily God's own truth.
RATNAM: One last question here. In terms of
coming back to the main point of our
discussion which is the technology
advanced technology for intelligence
purposes, are we investing enough and is
there a benchmark that you're aiming for
in terms of what would be a sufficient
investment?
HIMES: It's a question you should
ask me when the committee's work is
underway and again I don't want to sort
of jump to conclusions. So, so let me
answer that question this way the
community gets a lot of money. We spend
more money on our intelligence community
than most nations spend on their
national security.
What I worry more about are
sort of more traditional bureaucratic
impediments. It's hard for a bureaucracy
to change and it's really hard for a
bureaucracy to change technologically.
I don't want to overstate this these are
superbly innovative and thoughtful
people but people are people they get
used to ways of doing things and we need
to make sure that change is the rule
rather than the exception in the
intelligence community.
