Thank you, and welcome to Norwich University
and the Todd Lecture sponsored by the College
of Graduate and Continuing Studies as part
of our keynote for the 2017 Residency Conference.
For those that don't know, me, I'm Bill Clements,
dean of the College of Graduate and Continuing
Studies. The Todd Lecture Series is named
in honor of retired US Army Major General
and President Emeritus W Russell Todd, class
of 1950, and his late wife Carol in gratitude
for their service, dedication to Norwich University
and the larger Northfield community
I'd also like to recognize the Todd's daughter
and son-in-law, John and Ellen Drew and the
Drew Foundation who have generously donated
resources to Norwich University for the specific
purpose of funding this lecture series. We
are pleased to host Ms. Sarah Gallagher to
this evening's lecture, General and Mrs. Todd's
daughter. Ms. Gallagher, would you please
stand so we can welcome you?
The Todd Lecture Series program will always
be free and open to the greater Vermont community
as well as the Norwich student body and is
streamed live to students and alumni across
the globe. So, welcome to all of those who
are watching on the Internet tonight. This
evening's lecturer is Peter Warren Singer.
Dr. Singer is a strategist at New America
and an editor at Popular Science Magazine.
He was named by the Smithsonian as one of
the nation's 100 leading innovators, by Defense
News as one of the 100 most influential people
on defense issues, by Foreign Policy as their
top 100 global thinkers list, and by Analytica
Social Media data analysis, one of the 10
most influential voices in the world on cybersecurity
and the 25th most influential in the field
of robotics. His award-winning books include
Corporate Warriors, The Rise of Privatized
Military Industry, Children at War, Wired
for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict
in the 21st Century and Cybersecurity and
Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.
His latest book is Ghost Fleet, a novel of
the next world war, which many of our graduate
students read before their arrival to campus
in a coordinated �last read� initiative.
Ghost Fleet is a techno-thriller cross with
non-fiction research and co-authored with
August Cole, whom we have also welcomed to
campus this week. They will both be participating
in a book signing following tonight's lecture.
Dr. Singer has an extensive CV, as you see
in the program. I suggest that you take a
look.
He has served as coordinator of President
Obama's 2008 campaign's defense policy task
force, in the office of the Secretary of Defense,
and as the founding director of the Center
for the 21st Century Security and Intelligence
at the Brookings Institution, where Singer
was the youngest person named a senior fellow
in its 100-year history. Without further ado,
please welcome Peter Singer.
Thank you for the very kind introduction,
and also to the lecture series for making
all of this possible. I also just wanted to
add my congratulation to all the students
and their families gathered here. This is
a very special week I know for the organization,
but also for you personally. So, a little
bit of background more about myself and where
I'm coming from on this work. I work at what's
known as a think tank. It's a place called
New America, if you're not familiar with us.
We are a non-governmental non-partisan organization
that wrestles with where research technology
and policy all come crashing together.
We work on topics that range from the future
of the Internet to the future of early childhood
education and relevance to your work. We've
got two projects, they're different but they're
related: one is on cyber security and the
other is on the future of war, and each one
of them reflects the networked nature of these
spaces and they involve bringing together
a diverse group of experts. So for example
the future of war team has everything from
historians to former general counsel at the
Pentagon, to technologists, to recently retired
military officers with backgrounds that range
from Air Force acquisition officers to four
members of Navy Seal Team Six.
And what we�re all trying to do is wrestle
with the future. Now, the challenge and this
applies both to our work but more broadly
to those of us who look at the issues of security
at large is that we're not very good at it.
We have a terrible track record at trying
to predict the future, and my favorite example
of this is-- it's very politic right now to
beat up on the New York Times, so I'll do
that. But I'm going to use an older example
of it. It came on October 9th, 1903 and on
that date, the New York Times tried to predict
the future and it said quote, �The flying
machine which might really fly, might be evolved
by the combined and continuous efforts of
mathematicians and mechanicians,� that's
what they used to call engineers, �in from
one to ten million years from now.�
The exact date that the New York Times published,
those two brothers there, the Wright brothers,
began to assemble the first working flying
machine in that bicycle shop there in Dayton,
Ohio. Now, we could throw our hands up in
the air and say gosh the future is unpredictable,
we shouldn't even try. It's like driving in
the dark with your headlights off. The reality,
though, is that first you don't have a choice,
whether you're working in education, in training
to budgeting, to doctrine, to strategy, operational,
planning you are a futurist. You have to wrestle
with the future.
The second thing is that I would argue we
don't have a great track record at trying
to predict specific events with any kind of
great confidence, but we can identify the
forces that are out there that might shape
the potential future worlds that lie ahead
of us. Now, the way I'd like to illustrate
this, is imagine a teakettle on top of a stove.
Now, with all of our advanced science today,
we can send a robot to Mars that can Twitter
back at us, but for us to predict the behavior
of that water in that teakettle at the molecular
level; we can't do it. We just don't know
what each water molecule is going to do next.
But if we're looking at that system we wouldn�t
say gosh, it's inherently unpredictable. We
would ask ourselves very basic questions like
for example, is the heat on? Knowing that
if enough heat is applied to that teakettle,
we don't know exactly when or where that water
molecule will turn to steam. Now that doesn't
mean that is the inevitable future, all sorts
of other things can happen. Your little son
can come along and knock the teakettle over.
The point, though, is if you were looking
at that system and trying to predict the future,
you would identify heat whether the stove
is on or off as a key trend, a key force to
pay attention to.
As John Naismith once said, �Trends, like
horses, are easier to ride in the direction
that they're headed.� So if we're trying
to you know wrestle with the trends that are
out there, in particular the ones that are
going to shape your careers as you move into
these various leadership roles as you leave
here in the future.
I think there is, in particular, three related
to my work that will be important and important
in terms of not just what's going to happen
tomorrow, in the next year, but over that
generational-long issue. And they break into
technology itself, but also a new kind of
place and a new kind of race. And what's important
and different is that in each one of these
areas, the United States has been in the leadership
role but maybe won't be moving forward.
Now, the first one of these is technology
but it's a very special kind of technology
and it goes by lots of different buzzwords.
So it used to be in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon,
�revolutionary technology.� Now it's known
as �disruptive technology.� If you're
outside the military, weirdly enough, you
call it �a killer app.� What are we talking
about here?
We're talking about technology that is not
an evolutionary improvement--you know the
difference between iPhone 6 and iPhone 7--but
a leap ahead. The difference between a regular
phone and a smartphone. And what defines this
is not just the idea that it gives you something
that was a capability, that was science fiction
a generation earlier, but how it provokes
a whole new set of questions that were science
fiction a generation earlier.
That is, it doesn't solve all your problems
and there are questions about what's possible
that you didn't imagine was possible before.
But maybe more important, there are questions
about what is proper that you weren�t wrestling
with the generation earlier. And, that �what
is proper� might be anything from what is
the proper way to organize my business, or
my military unit or who's the proper person
to recruit or train, to maybe it's a question
of what is proper when it comes to new legal
or ethical questions that we weren't wrestling
with the generation earlier.
So what are some of these kind of technologies
that were seen out there? A couple years back
I was part of a project that was sponsored
by the Pentagon known as �Next Tech,�
and essentially what we did is that, much
like the research that you've been doing,
to answer this we went around and we conducted
a study. And what we did is, we interviewed
about 60 subject matter experts with very
diverse backgrounds. So everything from people
working in military organizations like DARPA;
the entity that invented the Internet itself;
or the Office of Naval Research was another
place; to people outside of the military working
in university labs, in academia; to people
working in business at leading technology
companies, like Google and Facebook. People
on the investment side, venture capitalists.
Those that are putting their money and making
the future come true. And we asked all of
these very different people the same basic
question, �What do you think today is equivalent
to the computer in 1980?� So it's not science
fiction, it exists but it is poised to change
the world the way the computer did. And their
answers, this is a word cloud but don't focus
on the word cloud, is they�re basically
broken down into five what you might imagine
as technology bucket areas/categories of technology.
As I'm going through them, go back and think
about that parallel of the computer both in
terms of how it jumped back and forth and
changing everything from war, to your family
life, to business. But also think about all
the decisions you either made or wish we had
made relative to computers that we wish we
could go back on. Imagine those applied to
these technology areas moving forward.
Now the first one of these technology areas
is hardware-- specifically robotics. We've
gone through an amazing change, so we're a
little bit past our 15-year anniversary of
our forces going in Afghanistan, and the force
that went in had a handful of unmanned aerial
systems. If you're like our Air Force people
here, we call them �remotely piloted aircraft.�
If you�re like the rest of them, we would
call it �drones.� We had a handful, none
of them armed. The ground force had zero unmanned
ground systems, ground robotics, equally,
none of them armed. Today in the US military
we have over 10,000 drones and many of them
are, of course, armed, to another 12,000 on
the ground. We're not the only players. At
New America we've identified 86 different
countries� militaries that have robotics
in them today. It's not just militaries, it's
also non-state actors that range from the
Dallas Police Department this last summer
used a jury-rigged armed ground robot to kill
a sniper, to right now in the Battle of Mosul
ISIS has
conducted over 200 drone missions, a third
of them armed.
Now sometimes people will go, �Oh, well
the ISIS ones you know they're not all that
great. They're ones they made themselves,
and are kind of junky.� They're science
fiction compared to a generation earlier.
We dreamed of having that kind of capability.
But of course the shift is not just in terms
of the numbers, it's how we think about and
experience maybe the most important thing
that goes on war itself. You just watched
an act of war, and you just experience the
same way that the person who pulled the trigger
did. Sitting thousands of miles away. Remote
from danger in a site. There's something going
on here when we think about the overall history,
the story of war, and how we experience it.
But that's the history, what's moving forward?
With robotics we're seeing all sorts of different
changes in everything from their designs,
particularly as we move away from thinking
about them as pure replacements for manned
machines and even the way we talk about them.
So �unmanned systems,� �driverless cars,�
a lot like how we used to call them �horseless
carriages.� Defining something by what it's
not, rather than what it is, �automobile
robot,� as we move away from being locked
in that kind of mindset, it shifts everything
from the design so we stop think about drones
as being you know planes with a cockpit painted
over.
It allows us to think about fundamentally
different sizes. Too, we can draw inspiration
from vastly different designers, maybe the
best designer of all nature. Now, this little
system here you can see it, it's flying in
San Francisco. Recently someone lost one of
these in Somalia. I can't imagine why someone
would want to fly a drone that looks like
a little bird in Somalia. Maybe some of the
Security Studies people can help us figure
out the why on that. It's not just though
the design, maybe more important is the shift
in their intelligence and their autonomy.
You're about to watch a historic moment where
a robotic system is about to take on the role
that a Navy pilot will tell you is the toughest
pilot task of all. In fact, they can't stop
talking about how it's such a tough task--take
off and land from an aircraft carrier. As
you can see, it does it perfectly and it can
do it perfectly again and again and again.
And it's not just the idea that it can do
it perfectly, it's also the fact that it can
then transfer that knowledge on how to do
it perfectly instantaneously to another like
system. Compare that to how not everyone can
be a pilot, not everyone can be a top gun
pilot, not every top gun pilot can be perfect,
and they can't then train someone else to
be perfect like them.
They can pass on their knowledge but it takes
literally months. Now, the shift when it comes
to robotics and their intelligence is moving
in two fundamentally different directions,
and one is in terms of kind of large scale
systems that are very clear replacements.
So, for example in the Ghost Fleet project
that August and I worked on, we identified
21 different examples of autonomous robotics
projects that the Pentagon is working on right
now. This right here is the first fully robotic
ship. It's not science fiction, we may have
written a novel, but I recently was on board
this ship, it's in San Diego. It's testing
there right now.
The idea of a robotic ship has introduced
very interesting issues. Relevant to summer
time, it doesn't have air conditioning on
it because why would you have air conditioning
on this ship. But then that's made life really
tough for the humans that have to repair the
ship inside it in the heat of summer, or when
it was previously was based in the Gulf of
Mexico. But the direction is one of large-scale
physical systems, and there�s a little bit
parallels nature where if you think about
in nature for some species intelligence is
in a single system. And that system, that
person for example, that animal can do the
task on their own.
So a good commercial illustration of this
was in this commercial that showed during
the NFL playoffs where Budweiser was excited
to show this 18-wheeler leaving a Budweiser
bottling plant carrying thousands of cans
of beer, and hold it gosh, the truck driver
just got up. So a very clear direct obvious
replacement, large scale physical system.
It's sort of odd that Budweiser was excited
about this because when you pull back and
think about the potential disruptive effects
of this on the American economy, you see this
layout of the most popular job by state and
how Budweiser just said isn't it cool that
a lot of these jobs are about to be automated?
Not what you want to think about when you're
watching the NFL playoffs if you're a truck
driver, but the point is that's one direction
of robotics and autonomy. The other is, just
like in nature, we have other species like
insects or ants where each little individual
is not all that smart, but together they can
do incredibly complex tasks. They disaggregate,
they network it. So we see the same version
going on with robotics. So take that simple
example of delivering a drink, we had an 18-wheeler
delivering tens of thousands of cans of beer
to 711 has already used a small drone to deliver
a single Slurpee drink to someone�s house.
First, that represents an entire new kind
of business model that you wouldn't have done
before. Second, it shows how science fiction
is coming true again, in this case Wall-E,
how lazy we are. The point though is that
it's not just a story of hardware, it leads
to the second technology bucket, software.
Where we see advancement but also how they're
linked together, and maybe one of the bigger
shifts here to be aware of is the emergence
of the Internet of Things. So right now there
are approximately seven billion of these devices
in the world that we use to communicate back
and forth.
Now these devices mostly computers, but moving
forward we are going to see, as you note from
this chart, about 50 billion things linked
up, but they're going to be different. They're
going to be everything from smart cars, robotics,
thermostats, refrigerators, you name it. Now,
it's not just the raw number, but it's also
a shift in terms of what they carry. So each
of these things packs multiple sensors that
is a part of the system that's collecting
information about the world around it. So
some of them are pretty obvious sensors like
your cell phone's camera.
My phone has about 25 sensors on it. Obvious
ones like the camera, but it also has things
operating in the background. Like for example
Geo location, and the point is that when you
crunch the numbers, those 50 billion things
actually yield about a trillion sensors gathering
data about the world around us. What is that
yield? Big data, more data than we've ever
had before in human history, but importantly
different forms of data being brought together
that allow us to draw entire new insights
about the world around us, surprising insights.
My favorite illustration of this is a study
for the criminal justice people in the room--
they found that judges sentenced people to
jail for about 2% longer if the sports team
in their hometown lost the night before. Now,
you know that seems very marginal, 2% that's
statistically insignificant, but if you're
going to jail for 2% longer because the Cleveland
Cavs lost the night before, that doesn't seem
fair. But the point is that human researchers
if they're looking at judges sentencing that's
not where they would automatically look. But
machines� algorithms were able to bring
these insights together in new different ways.
The point is that what we see here is also
a story of artificial intelligence. We've
grown numb to the spread of AI around us.
AI is why, for example, your kids can't spell�autocomplete,
right? But more important AI is becoming strong
and taking on top human tasks. Not just at
Jeopardy, but in fields like medicine for
example. They perform better at identifying
cancer than top human oncologists, to a lot
of people here working in cybersecurity. At
the Def Con Convention recently �Mayhem,�
an AI, had a bug hunting task that takes humans
weeks; it did it in a matter of minutes.
Which then raises the interesting question:
will we see parts of the cybersecurity field
go through what factory workers and those
truck drivers are going through? Another bucket
area, waveware energy. New forms of energy
coming on the line, old forms being distributed
in new ways. But it also redefines technology
itself. So a good illustration of this would
be that drone there at the bottom. That one
is powered, not by regular aviation gas but
by hydrogen. And then there's another one
that uses solar.
And the point is that these systems and they're
being worked on both by DARPA and by Facebook.
For the Facebook system, they didn't even
bother to design landing gear for it because
it's going to stay up in the air not for hours,
not for days, not for weeks, seven to ten
months. Solely by changing the energy source,
we just redefined the plane into something
almost like a satellite. But maybe the more
important for war story of energy is illustrated
by this guy. In all of human history, weapons
used kinetic force--a fist, a spear, a bullet--and
the idea of using energy as a weapon was science
fiction.
So the first time we meet Han Solo you know
he tells Luke Skywalker there's nothing better
than having that blaster by your side. Now,
I'm going to spoiler alert. I've given you
enough warning: In the (recent Star Wars)
movies it�s 30 years later and two things
are notable. The first is Han Solo is still
packing that exact same blaster that he shot
first with 30 years earlier. But the second--
there's a couple of nerds in the room who
got the joke.
The second thing is we�re 30 years forward
in the real world and that the science fiction
of Star Wars is now real. We advanced faster
technologically than the world of Star Wars
did, and this is not just in terms of tests.
For example this is showing off a high energy
laser hitting a rocket at distance. It's also
in terms of deployment this USS Ponce, a warship
in the Persian Gulf, equipped with directed
energy to defend the ship against one of the
prior new areas, small drones.
New weapons, like rail guns which we explored
in Ghost Fleet, don't use the chemistry of
gunpowder, but use electromagnetic magnetism
to sling a shell ten times further than what
a cannon could do before. That not only revolutionizes
the idea of the cannon, now it has for example
the range of a missile, but it's also causing
some very deep questions for military services
themselves. So, for example the Marine Corps
and the Army have a history of a certain role--coastal
defense--that they don't do now.
They have a long history at it, they don't
do it now but now there is a weapon that is
perfectly suited for that and also well attuned
to the strategic demands in the Pacific in
terms of defending disputed islands. And so
they have to go ask themselves, do we use
this new technology to go back to our heritage
that we're not as much of a fan of? Another
key technology bucket the tool itself. There
was a technology never imagined in the world
of Star Wars.
It wasn't in the original Star Trek. It wasn't
until the best Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next
Generation, that we get the idea of a replicator,
or what we would call 3D Printer. Direct digital
manufacturing using a computer design a bit
to create a thing, an atom. Now there's all
sorts of examples of how this is going to
be disruptive across the economy and security
itself. It's everything from companies like
Saab--as you see I was recently out with them.
They plan to make money not just by selling
you the system, be it the plane, or the car
or whatever, but there's more money in the
literal decades of spare parts that they'll
sell you.
What happens as these spare parts are now
available to be made by someone else, including
the client? That bus there is Ollio. Ollio
is a 3D-printed autonomous electric shuttle
bus made by Local Motors, an Arizona-based
automaker that crowd sources vehicle design.
Every clause in that sentence is disruptive
to the economy of cars: 3D Printed, autonomous,
electric, Arizona-based, crowd-source design.
Again this is not science fiction. Ollio is
actually going to be operating in Washington,
D.C. going back and forth at the Nationals
baseball stadium.
Also there is the drone at the bottom. It
has about, to give you a sense of its scale,
a two-meter wingspan, goes about 100 miles
per hour, and is almost completely silent.
Its origin is that a group of university students
and Great Britain wanted to build a drone
that was better than what the British military
had. They designed it in a CAD program. For
the World War Two history buffs in the room
you'll notice it a Spitfire-style wings. They
designed it a CAD program, they print it with
3D Printers, and they fly it in the course
of a week. Compare their concept design to
manufacture cycle to, I don't know, the F35.
The point though is not just their speed,
not just who did it, but where they did it.
And inspired by this, the British military
said, �This is a really some interesting
gear, we'd like it. We'd like to manufacture
it.� So they built their version here. This
is its maiden flight from the factory, it
was built on a warship and then flew off the
warship. So the warship became an arsenal
in the redefinition of the term. Arsenals
used to be where militaries made their weapons.
Then New Englander Samuel Colt comes along
and comes up with the idea of civilian mass
manufacture. And then arsenals become where
militaries store weapons.
Now we have the possibility of going back
to that history, or a different example will
be illustrated by this gentleman. He's holding
the tool that he made. Is it kind of a weird
angle because he's floating in space? The
point is if you can make it on a warship,
if you can make it in space, you can make
pretty much make it anywhere. Another key
shift, wetware, human performance modification.
Using technology to shift what we can do.
Or the science fiction version of this would
be Iron Man, meets Captain America, meets
the Russian Olympic Athlete Program. Now it's
playing out in all sorts of different ways.
For example, what's going on in genomics is
moving faster than the breakthroughs that
excite us in IT, hacking the human body with
chemistry.
Affecting everything from how long you need
to sleep, your endurance levels, to your concentration
levels, to where hardware, software and wet-ware
come crashing together. Brain machine interfaces.
Like Brain Gate here, where this gentleman,
he's not able to move his arms or legs. This
is a DARPA�s funded project, but he's been
hooked up to a computer that converts the
thoughts in his brain, which are basically
electric signals, into software code zeros
and ones, and that allows him via thought
to move around a cursor on a computer screen.
Which allows them via thought to do everything
from navigate the Internet, to type email
on a virtual keyboard.
The point, though, is this is not just for
people as a medical treatment. And it's not
just in the idea of being a jack into your
brain. It's moving into everything from that
you wear a skull cap that�s used in video
gaming, to this gentleman would be an illustration.
He is flying a drone via thought. For the
science fiction fans, this is Clint Eastwood's
movie Firefox come to life. And also again
changes the way you think about our relationship
with robotics--if you can thought control
of them. This idea of modification, human
performance modification, comes in lots of
different forms.
It's everything from replacing something that's
been lost: Like the service woman who lost
her arm in Iraq to an IED. Getting not just
a kind of a replacement but matching it. So,
compare her arm to this gentleman you can
see has pretty much the dexterity of a human
hand here, but technology takes you into new
different directions. So, it's not just that
he�s controlling it via thought, but he
doesn't have to be in that room because of
one of the other things we heard about-- the
Internet, right? Other times it may be surpassing
performance in very clear obvious direct ways.
So for example, every time I meet a Marine,
they try and crush your hand in a handshake?
They wouldn't try it with this gentleman,
because very you know obviously clear cut
stronger, but again technology might cause
advancement in wildly different ways. Several
years back I devised a video game series called
Metal Gear Solid, and it�s set in like the
2040s. Now, last year in the real world, a
gentlemen approached the video game company
and said, �I'd like to build a version of
the technology that's in the game.� They
gave him some startup funding to do it, they
saw it as kind of a cool marketing thing.
This is what he made. It is a robotic arm
but he added certain modifications that weren't
in the game.
It packs a drone in the shoulder and a smartphone
in the wrist. This is not 2040, this is technically
history. This is 2016. Now this should all
seem kind of exciting, but simultaneously
scary. But for the people who specialize in
cybersecurity here, they're going it�s scary
for a very different reason because it opens
up new vulnerabilities. We've already seen
hacking of cars. These are medical devices
that have been hacked. It's not a hacker convention
unless someone's hacking a drone at it right
now.
To that Internet of Things I talked about
that's so exciting--70% of the things that
have been woven into it so far, 70% have known
vulnerabilities in them. And of course in
cybersecurity, it's not just the known stuff
that gets you. The point is, this leads to
the second big Meta trend. We have a shift
in the overall kind of story of place. Not
just what we use, but where we contend, where
we fight and again pull back in history. This
is, to make that science fiction parallel,
this is the entire Internet when we first
met Han Solo. When the first Star Wars came
out. This is it, this is why Princes Leia
just can't email you the plans of the Death
Star. No one's thinking about that.
This is the Internet today visualized, and
of course this doesn�t do justice to the
complexity of this space and how we all use
it independently. But along with that growth
is that we've seen a growth in danger, and
part of that story is the emergence of new
threat actors, or rather the evolution of
new threat actors. The first threats were
people like this kid, literally the 16-year-old
in his parents' basement who's using that
very powerful device to crack into the FBI
and the CIA.
Now you'll notice besides that powerful computer
for whatever reason he has one of those old
printers with the perforated paper on the
side. I don't know what he's using it for,
but it's sort of funny to think that's how
hackers used to operate. But the point is
we've seen it go from being kids in their
parents' basement, people looking for attention,
to highly organized threat actors that range
from transnational criminal networks, to the
more than 100 nations that have created some
kind of cyber military command.
And the point is that it's very complex, it's
very scary, but the future of danger in this
domain, in this locale, is arguably quite
simple. It's all about information and what
you can do with it. The problem is that you
can do very powerful things with it. Again
on the civilian and the military side. Now,
the first thing that you can do with information,
you can collect it. One of the other shifts
in the story of the Internet is not just the
things, but also the emergence of social media.
Where we are all not just collectors of information
now, we are all individual distributors of
information. Via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
and the result of that is that every single
conflict actor be it ISIS, be it Chicago gangs,
be at the Russian military, are telling their
story online right now or other people are
watching them and telling their story.
And then in turn every single act of violence
is being talked about in real time, with the
result is that we are entering an era where
arguably there are no more secrets. The illustration
of this, that I think will be a tune for a
number of the people in this room with a special
operations background, would be the Bin Laden
raid. One of the most secretive military operations
of our lifetime that was live tweeted by a
Pakistani IT engineer who just happened to
live in Abbottabad. To ongoing operations
right now in Syria where we can all watch
Facebook feeds of them.
This, though, is causing a reaction. So there
may be no more secrets--the truth is out there--but
there's a counter-disinformation influence
operations. Bury the truth underneath a sea
of lies. And the specialists in this is Russia,
who literally invented information warfare,
and we've seen this in everything from their
operations in Ukraine, to their operations
and elections everywhere from Poland, UK,
Germany, France and the United States. The
second thing you can do with information:
stealing. Many of the people in this room
probably got this letter because someone China
broke into the Office of Personnel Management
and stole classified background information.
It's just like what goes on in regular crime.
Someone steals a credit card, the difference
though is that now you can do it on scale.
So, rather than James Bond stealing one file,
they stole 22 million files. Don't steal one
credit card, you can steal tens of millions
of credit cards. It's that scale now that
the space allows, but we're also seeing interesting
new combinations. For example, the cross of
commercial and state-linked theft and espionage
may be best illustrated by these two points
here. On the top is the F35 Joint Strike Fighter,
the most expensive weapons project in all
of human history.
We will spend more than a trillion--that's
with a �T� --dollars than, for example,
we spent on the Manhattan Project, and the
reason is it's to give us a generation ahead
advantage on the battlefield. On the bottom,
well that looks like the F35, just for some
reason they painted it blue and they put red
stars on it. That's because it's the J31,
China's new stealth fighter. Now, it either
looks like the F35 out of sheer coincidence,
or it's because, as we documented Ghost Fleet,
the design process was penetrated on three
separate occasions.
It's very hard to win an arms race if you're
paying the research and development for the
other side. Another thing you could do with
information--block information. This is an
illustration of what Russia did to Ukraine
in the lead up to their physical conflict.
On the cyber side, they threw up the equivalent
of a blockade. Sort of blocking communication
between everything from Ukrainian business
websites, to government websites, to individual
military units in the field. It had a paralyzing
effect on Ukraine as a nation. In essence
Ukraine loses the cyber side of the conflict,
the cyber war before the real war ever begins.
And the commercial version of this would be
like the DDoS campaigns that we've seen. For
example, in the Mirai episode a couple months
ago that locked down some the world's most
popular websites. Everything from Travelocity
to Amazon, you name it. Basically blocking
the flow of information. The final thing you
can do with information--haven't seen a lot
of it but this is the real one to pay attention
to--change it. It�s illustrated best by
this guy: Stuxnet. Someone, the United States
and Israel, built a cyber weapon that went
after Iranian nuclear research. We didn't
need to steal it, we know how to build atomic
bombs. Instead what it did is it got inside
and change the settings of their physical
equipment. Things like the pressure settings
that then caused physical damage.
It sabotaged their machinery. Now it's important
in a number of different ways. First in history,
it's the very first digital weapon. It's like
every other weapon in history, it physically
damages the target. But it's unlike every
other weapon in history, because it was just
a bunch of zeros and ones. You couldn't touch
it. You could be in multiple places at once,
that's how we know about it. It's sabotaged
Iranian nuclear research, it also popped up
in 25,000 other computers around the world.
But the other part of it which maybe should
worry us moving forward, is digital weaponry
brings its own blueprint with it.
And Stuxnet which went after industrial control
systems--like SCADA industrial control systems
that are used in everything from traffic lights
to US Navy engine room. So we've opened up
a kind of new realm of cyber conflict with
far greater consequences. The result is that
it's changing our relationship with information
itself.
So this is a picture from the Battle of Jutland,
a little over 100 years ago in World War One.
And you can see what that young British Navy
officer sees. They see a literal fog of war,
or rather smoke of war, and it's both from
ships burning but also ships deliberately
laying down smoke. The result is, it's hard
for them not just to figure out where the
enemy is, but where they are, where their
allies are. Now, compare that to our relationship
with information over the last generation.
We complain about TMI--Too Much Information--or
when I was out at military bases in the Middle
East, the way they would always describe it,
is they�ll say, �It�s like sipping from
a fire hose.�
My inbox is flooded with all of this data,
all this information coming at me, and my
problem is figuring out what's important keeping
pace with it. What if moving forward our relationship
with information is not too much of it, but
that firehose, that spigot, either being turned
off or the water being poisoned. Where we're
like that officer 100 years ago struggling
to figure out where are we, where are my friends,
where are my foes, who do I trust? It's a
very different thing not just for a machinery,
but for our mentality.
And we also have bigger fundamental questions
to figure out. For example, how do we organize,
how do we train, how do we equip and I think
that's again some of the things that you're
wrestling with in this space. There's one
final big Meta trend that I want introduced
to this, which is the consequence. Why we
care about this more. There is a shift not
just in the technology and where it's playing
out, but there's a new kind of race. For example,
when we think about China, I told the story
of, �Oh they're stealing some of our designs.�
But they're also doing exciting work.
This is the world's fastest supercomputer
in China made only with Chinese parts: two
robots. This is an armed robot, showing off
at a trade show. Hypersonic vehicles that
go faster than many of our air defenses. The
point is that we have a shift not just in
the story of technology, but in geopolitics
itself, or maybe it's a little bit of a throwback
because the context is in Europe, we are seeing
the highest points of alert since the height
of the Cold War in the mid-1980s. Because
of this guy, and the land grabs in places
like the Ukraine.
In the Pacific, we're engaged in an arms race.
Where a China that's newly confident, assertive
and capable, for example, is building more
warships, more warplanes than other nation
over the last several years and plans to do
so moving forward. In turn, the United States
military has a new strategy to offset it.
The point in all of this, is that a lot of
people believe that we're seeing a kind of
new version of the Cold War. But we may also
see expressions in different ways.
New threats, new zones. A lot of people frame
this as hybrid warfare and it works in two
different ways. The first is using state assets
to appear as non-state actors. So, for example
these are not Russian Special Forces, these
are just �little green men� that happened
to show up in Ukraine and wanted to take photos
with little girls. The same phenomena in cyberspace:
it wasn't Russian intelligence that attacked
the Democratic National Committee. No, no,
no, no, it was a Romanian hacker who for whatever
reason couldn't speak Romanian. The opposite
we�re seeing in the Pacific which is taking
nonmilitary assets and using them in traditional
military ways.
The little blue men, like for example a Coast
Guard that outclasses most navies or the cyber
version of this would be university-based
cyber militia. But we also have to face up
that there's something that fortunately didn't
happen in the Cold War, which is the possibility
that it might turn hot. As one Chinese military
officer put it, �We must bear a third world
war in mind when developing our military forces.�
And this is a depiction from Chinese media
of how they think the third world war might
go, and as you can see it's going really poorly
for whoever operates Nimitz-class aircraft
carriers.
That's what August and I wrestled with in
the Ghost Fleet book. This idea of a melding
between 20th-century-style politics and 21st-century-technologies
and trends. The point is, to circle back,
I�m not saying this will happen. I'm not
saying it is inevitable. I'm just saying these
are trends for us to be aware of. That the
sort of things that were thinkable in the
20th century, that were unthinkable for the
last generation, are thinkable once more and
that has to change the way we look at the
world.
The way we prepare ourselves and the responsibility
which we take in particular to keep this story
where it belongs which is in fiction. So,
in closing you can see I didn't come up here
and give you a bunch of easy answers. Rather
what we have going on is just an amazing array
of trends and challenges and that's why I
think programs like yours are so important
in bringing together both the technical skill
set, but also the leadership skill sets because
it's that combination, I believe, is the only
way that we're going to be able to thrive
in this world of ever-changing trends and
challenges. Thank you.
Thank you very much Peter. We have some time
for questions. We have two microphones set
up. I think we�ll dedicate the microphone
on this side to our students who are here
for their study and then for public and other
questions will be my left. But I suppose to
get us started while lines are queuing up,
I�ll ask a general question that I�m fascinated
by. The disinformation elements of the technology,
and some of the things that we�ve been experiencing.
On one hand it's difficult to think what do
you do about that. How do we how do we counter
that? I don�t know what your thoughts would
be, maybe for some more tangible you know
we're living it. But how do we how live with
it?
Sure, so the story of disinformation influences
campaigns. Take news, what we need to understand
is in many ways, it mirrors the Internet itself.
The producers of it are diverse, and have
very diverse mentalities and incentives and
reasons for doing it. So if you think of the
phenomena of fake news, it involves everything
from people with a very clear political agenda
and that might be a foreign government political
agenda, to a partisan domestic political agenda,
to an ecosystem that aligns with it which
is for profit actors.
So, as an example, there's a group of essential
Macedonian teenagers who run one of the biggest
clusters of fake news. Things pushed out on
Facebook and they're making money off of ad
clicks. They basically figured out that Americans
are prone to believing the worst news about
their political foes, so you know rather than
selling diet ads, they basically generated
a bunch of fake news and profited from it.
They were, for example, behind the origin
of �the pope endorsed Donald Trump.�
Which whether you are a Trump supporter or
not, it's definitive that the pope did not
endorse him, and yet they got 36 million clicks
on that. And there's this great story: basically
the night club in the town that they're from
every Thursday night, these geeks basically
take it over like old school gangsters because
that's when the ad click money from Google
comes in. And they literally spray each other
with champagne. They're basically making money
off of our gullibility, but they're aligned
with Russian disinformation.
So, in turn, we need to understand our response
has to kind of mirror this broader--it's everything
from us as individual consumers. If something
seems too good to be true, it's probably that
to the platforms. And we've seen the technology
companies go from saying, �I'm not responsible
for what's on my network.� to �Hold it.
I better do a better job of policing it.�
And one area when it comes to foreign influence
operations, I believe we need to restart a
program from the Cold War called the Active
Measures Working Group.
Back in the Cold War, it was a team between
State Department, CIA, information agencies,
and basically what it did was they tried to
find KGB information campaigns. False stories
that the KGB was planting, and then counter
them. So, back in the Cold War it was things
like the Americans � they spread a story
in Africa right before the 1984 Olympics that
the Americans were inviting athletes to Los
Angeles to try and infect them with AIDS.
And CIA identifies it; State Department can
then counter it. We close that up at the end
of the Cold War. We need to restart it and
it's not just the value of stopping these
campaigns, it will also allow us to in essence
identify the useful idiots. That is the Russian
term, �the useful idiots,� in our own
system that are taking Russian misinformation
and spreading it as fact.
Those are groups that do a disservice to us.
A straightforward one would be the cluster
that's built around and for wars. We�ve
seen that is if you can identify where stories
originate, a Russian propaganda source, and
then track it as it moves into our ecosystem
by identifying that in a more official manner,
it will allow people to debunk these false
stories.
My name is Bill Walsh, I graduated from Norwich
40 years ago in 1977. At the time I didn't
have a beard. And starting in 1984 I worked
for a management consulting firm. We used
dialogue retrieval service and dialogue was
basically not technically pre-internet. But
we might only be able to search 12 different
sources and it would cost us $300 an hour,
which is $900 or $1,200 now.
We go to where we are now, I have a couple
concerns. The collapse of the Internet, that
would be one if that's possible. And what
your thoughts are on that? And also all of
our gadgetry, what is happening to our human
communications face to face? And where is
that going when everybody walking down the
street is tied to their phones and you say
hi to somebody and they go right back to their
phones? Thank you.
So you know great big questions in terms of
the threat to the overall internet itself--there
are a variety of threats that might do it.
The underlying systems, for example, which
power it, or certain parts of the hardware.
But the great thing of the Internet is its
structure itself; by being networked gives
it resilience, allows it to recover, allows
it to work around. That's what makes it so
very difficult to censor things on the Internet,
wherever you throw up a block things move
around it.
So to me I'm less worried about the overall
threats to the Internet, versus what the threats
that move within or on the Internet that are
enhanced by it. And that might be, as we talked
about, cyber threats, which with the emergence
of the Internet of Things, move the story
from stealing your secrets to causing physical
change in the world. So the difference of
your files being hacked versus your car being
hacked. And we've already seen you know as
I mentioned someone pumping the brakes remotely
from a car. So we'll see more and more physical
consequence from things playing out. And again,
why is that? Because of all the positive things
that the Internet is running in our world--we�re
not going to move away from it because of
these threats.
The other is the ideology side. That's where
the question of fake news. Where we've seen
certain poisoning of our political system.
The Internet allows people to find each other
online. And it might be people finding love,
or it might be people who share an ideology
of hate finding each other. And that's why
we've seen the story of a rise of ISIS and
its ability to energize lone wolf actors thousands
of miles away. So to me it's not the threat
to the Internet itself, it's the threats borne
upon the Internet.
Your second question--yeah that's a generational
shift. We had certain skill sets. Our ability
to have conversations on the phone has fundamentally
changed. Some people think nothing of picking
up the phone and other people are completely
allergic to it. And the same as you mentioned,
looking down all the time. The reality though
is that's always been the case. Every new
technology, it's changed the way we communicate
and not just in our interpersonal, but in
our politics itself.
My favorite illustration of this, is that
the average length of a speech by a politician
essentially went with the advent of the radio
from about an hour in length, to under 10
minutes in length. And back then people were
horrified by that. Well now you get television
to, well its 140 characters. So we've always
seen this. But the point is people back with
the radio would have said the same thing.
So speaking on behalf of my generation's age
group, I don't think any of us want war. We've
had enough history of it. I want humans to
walk on other planets, and I would love to
see a dinosaur that would be really cool.
As much as I want a Bugatti Chiron, I understand
that buying a $1.5 million vehicle probably
disenfranchises a lot of other individuals
to get to that point. But what can we do,
keeping in mind the inherent human corruption
to remove some of the power that leaders that
are driven by power and profit, to get them
out of control. That are causing a lot of
these conflicts using this technology that's
pretty much connecting everything.
So this question, the story that you lay out.
I mean this is not a 2017 question; it could
be a 2000 BC question. You know we've always
had this back and forth between the search
for peace and the history of humans at battle
with each other. And it's linked to the story
of technology is, just as law. My take is
technology itself doesn't have the morality,
it's the way the humans behind it use it.
So the very first technology, someone picked
up a rock and they either used it to build
something like a fireplace or a tool or they
bashed someone in the head in it.
And that's the same story moving forward when
we think about to the last question, the Internet.
It's been the most powerful force for good
in certainly our lifetimes in terms of spreading
knowledge and business efficiency in whatever,
and by the way it's been a portal for hate.
So, we've seen this kind of story again and
again. I think what you then raise is really
an issue of how do we go after some of the
underlying causes? And when are the causes,
the wrong people are empowered, or when are
the causes some kind of underlined scarcity.
Again is it then an ideology?
I think what should worry us right now is
the just sheer amount of flux that's going
on in not just American politics, but global
politics at large. And again to go back to
that this seemingly was a talk about the future,
but we keep referencing history. What are
the historic parallels for where we are today?
And people keep making these parallels and
I think there are some apt ones to those periods
of 1920s and �30s in terms of global ideological
change, economic change, technology shift,
old rules falling by the wayside, the emergence
of populism, you name it. And those are some
scary parallels and so then we have to ask
ourselves, �Okay, what are the firebreaks?
What are the structures?�
And again, it might be political structures,
it might be moral structures that we can put
in place to avoid those kind of bad outcomes
that we�ve seen in the past. That�s similarly
the project that August and I did, it�s
a novel, it�s not--we hope � an act of
prediction. Who wants a World War to happen?
We hope in many ways it�s kind of an act
of prevention, and that by identifying some
of the trend lines, identifying some of the
mistakes that people make, that it allows
you to then take measures to avoid it.
I would like to know your thoughts. We�re
about 9 months after the election, and I was
just listening to VPR today and they were
still discussing the Russian influence on
the election, which is huge. At this time
last year, I just thought it was sore losers,
or this or that or the other thing. What kind
of strategic, purely strategic aside from
politics, does Russia have manipulating elections?
Other than making us look stupid and incompetent?
What are some of the things that they can
do to better their position?
Sure. It�s important first, again it kind
of connects to your question about fake news
to the last question. One of the biggest challenges
is that we no longer all agree on common facts,
let alone kind of common rules of the game.
I have to preface my answer to establish the
common facts, and even then, some people in
the room won�t believe them. But frankly,
these are the facts of the matter: So the
facts of the matter are that the Russian,
as I mentioned, campaign hit both Democrat
and Republican targets, Democrat National
Committee, Republican National Committee,
both Republican and Democrat prominent individuals.
You recall John Podesta but also Colin Powell,
both got breached.
Both clear political organizations, like I
mentioned; to governmental organizations,
like depending on joint staff email system;
to organizations outside the space, like a
series of American universities and think
tanks. It started well before the election;
it�s been documented as continuing after
the election. In fact one of the attacks used
the hook of downloading election results to
try and trick people to doing it. It didn�t
just target America; it targeted everything
from Norwegian Nuclear Research Institute,
to Danish Defense Ministry, to the World Anti-doping
Agency after Russian athletes were caught
doping, to elections everywhere from France
to Germany, you name it.
Okay, so bigger than just that, we can�t
look at it through the, �Ah, but how do
we know it was Russia?� Well, at least the
groups that have concluded it was Russia include
all American Intelligence Agencies, the FBI,
the Intelligence Agencies of all our leading
allies; UK, France, Australia, Estonia, Czech.
Why would they care about this? To maybe more
important, five different cybersecurity companies.
That�s really interesting because private
companies and cybersecurity are incentivized
to disagree with each other, they like to
debunk each other�s work. So the fact that
five of them all concluded the same thing
is a really big deal.
We have to establish this, because we�ve
had a back and forth in our politics. First
when it happened in the summer time, we had
prominent individuals say, �Well there was
no hack, this is all made up.� To then,
�Well it was a 400-pound hacker.� To,
�Oh no, it was some kid, it was a teenager
in their basement.� To finally on January
11th, we had finally the former President
Obama, and the current President Trump both
say Russia did it. He�s since gone back
and said, �Well actually it may not have
been them.�
The point is, we can�t even get to your
question about what do we do about it, until
we accept the common facts of the matter.
The problem then of this allowing a clear
national security issue, not just a democracy
issue, but this affects cyber deterrence.
Moving forward is that we haven�t been able
to have an effective conversation as long
as we cling to this kind of misinformation
about what�s playing out. What can we do
about it? There�s a wide variety of things
we can talk longer on, but they involve both
sort of what you asked about building up resilience
structures, but also deterrence involves retaliation.
In effect, right now the cyberattacks are
viewed by the attacker as incredibly low cost
to generate, low cost in terms of the consequence
for you and high gain because a nation with
the economy equivalent of Spain, the 13th
largest economy, and falling has basically
caused massive disarray and disruption among
its enemies, as in our allies. We�ve got
to change that dynamic.
We�ve got time for a couple more before
the book signing.
My question is, as vulnerabilities are growing
so rapidly, what are your thoughts on non-state
organized groups of hackers like Anonymous
on the effects they�ll continue to have
as these vulnerabilities grow on? Not just
national security, but it could be economy
or society in general. Well, it might be amusing
to see that they hacked into ISIS� social
media accounts and put links to pornography
or things like that. That opens a door for
retaliations and further terrorist attacks
to the cause of taking more lives.
There�s a long history 
of non-state actors being influential and
also allowing new types of non-state actors.
Anonymous, which you mentioned, is like a
perfect illustration of that. Where it�s
a hacktivist group, it�s a new form of activism.
It�s a network and despite it being named
Anonymous, it�s actually literally out in
the open, in terms of a target is collectively
agreed upon, the dates of when they�re going
after, and what we�re all going to do, and
kind of people pitch in.
It has an ethic contrary this goes back to
the way we think about youth today, millennials,
is that you don�t try and take personal
credit for it. It also illustrates the kind
of back and forth of how we view the ethics
and the morality of the group. So, Anonymous
has simultaneously been thanked and lauded
by, I was in an event where an assistant secretary
of state mentioned their activities against
ISIS as �great stuff.�
Simultaneously, it�s had the Department
of Justice go after it. The origin of the
group, the very first mention of Anonymous,
is actually when it went after child sex crimes
ring. It was applauded in the media and then
later on you get this back and forth, and
I think again that notion, it�s like any
other history of activism. It kind of depends
on how you think of the cause. So, we�re
in New England, the home of civil disobedience.
And Thoreau, was he a great figure, or was
he a guy who wouldn�t pay his taxes? Depends
on the way you looked at him. He was an anti-war
protestor who wouldn�t pay his taxes.
Moving forward, we�ll continue to see more
and more of these groups just by the sheer
nature of the space, and, as I mentioned in
the past question, able to do more and more
actions with real consequences as opposed
to just nuisance type or joke type things
or symbolic. They�ll be able to do more
consequential activities, again, for better
or for worse. There is a reality in this space
that because of the sheer scale of organization,
the big dogs still bite the most.
So, a group like Anonymous, a clear important
player but it doesn�t have the heft that
a Chinese 3rd department or a National Security
Agency, because they don�t have the scale,
resources, people, budget, the type of cyber
weaponry. Non-state actors matter more than
they�ve ever before but states aren�t
going away.
One more question then we move to our book
signing.
I studied Soviet active measures in Interwar
Britain, that influence operations and such.
Inevitably, of course, I do see there�s
lots history. Maybe it doesn�t necessarily
repeat, but it rhymes. And there is definitely
some of that going on. Russians have been
trying to disrupt us for some time, obviously.
My question, really I was wondering if you
would just talk a little bit about the civil
liberties aspect to this new kind of warfare,
and then maybe you�ve seen how that works
also with government power?
It's a great question, and it's a tough one
to end on, because it's literally causes a
library�s worth of things. I think the way
to frame it is, there are definite historic
echoes, but there are new challenges in everything
from the legal authorities, to the you use
government as is sort of the adjudicator here,
but what's different now is that we see private
companies in that role of adjudicating free
speech rights in a way they haven't previously.
You could see this. The challenge that technology
companies, the Facebooks, the Twitters, etc.
are going through where originally they�re
engineers in background, they weren't free
speech advocates, they wanted to create great
new product.
And their attitude towards it was, my clients,
my customers. It's a platform they'll use
it. We don't want to be in terms of regulating
our customers. We're in a space of people
with interest in politics that quickly becomes
untenable. It becomes, first, there's clear
crimes that everyone agrees, they don't want
to have happen on their systems, things like
child sex crimes. And so very soon, social
network companies say, �Yeah, you can do
anything, except this.�
Then, they start to run into the politics
of where their customers live. For example,
it is our right as Americans to be utterly
stupid, ahistoric and evil, and say the Holocaust
didn't happen, even though it did. Whereas
in France, to say the same thing, would be
to commit a crime. And so, how does a company
navigate that? Then we get the challenges
more recently with acts of violence, and related
to a group like an ISIS. What happens when
there is a violence shown on your social network?
The companies go from and say, �Well, I'm
not in charge of regulating that� to �Okay,
yeah, I don't want terrorists to use my network.�
Then they say, �Okay, no acts of violence
on our network.� But then, they get interesting
things like, well, that means they're automatically
censoring imagery from World War II. They�re
like, �No, no, no, that's history, we can't
censor history.� Are then, the people who
are engaging in counter-extremism saying,
�No, no, no, we need you to show that violence
that ISIS is doing, so we can argue against
them and show how they're a violent organization.�
Again, circle back--it's a group of engineers.
It's a technology company that's been asked
to adjudicate this to circle back to your
fake news.
They go from saying, �It's not our role
to police fake news,� to the 2016 election.
They go, �I don't like the idea that our
customers are being taken advantage of in
this way by a bunch of everything from kind
of post-Soviet echoes of influence operations,
to a bunch of teenagers who are profiting
off their gullibility.� They're now moving
to both regulated, but also weirdly enough
and it's a great way to end, develop new technology
to try and solve our political questions.
If you go from Facebook to Twitter and the
like and you ask them, how are you going to
deal with these problems of for example hate
speech and violence, and all the bad things
on your network? Their answer: artificial
intelligence. Of course, that will open up
a whole new set of wonderful political questions.
The great thing for all of us in this space
is, no matter the technology, we're always
going to be in business. May we gather here
200 years from now. Thank you.
