Apple has finally caved to users demanding the ‘right to repair’, allowing owners of iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices to tinker with their electronics at home instead of bringing them to notoriously expensive service centers.

Called Self Service Repair, the feature is set to launch “early next year” in the US before expanding to other countries. Some 200 parts are expected to be available, along with instructions on how to replace them.

Initially, the company will offer repairs for the iPhone 12 and 13, to be followed by Macs with M1 chips. Users will be able to replace the phones’ display, battery, and camera – some of the earliest parts to cease functioning – using original equipment from the company. While Apple encourages only “individual technicians with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices,” urging users to take their devices to a professional before cracking them open themselves, the move nevertheless represents a major step for a company that has long been resistant to allowing users to even swap out a battery.

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Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook at the Apple Store on University Avenue, Palo Alto, California, September 20, 2013.
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After rolling out repair instructions and parts for the iPhone 12 and 13, the company will gradually expand users’ abilities to fix their phones themselves without having to wait in line at the Apple Store. Users who attempt to make these repairs on their own will not void their warranty, according to TechCrunch, representing another major change for the tech giant.

Even this week, Apple was sealing off users’ ability to fix their own phones, barring users who replaced their own screens from being able to use Face ID recognition going forward. However, the various departments seem to be coordinating among themselves – users will receive a recycling credit for returning their used or broken part after completing the repair, and the company plans to sell “more than 200 individual parts and tools,” as well as repair manuals customers can peruse before attempting to repair their devices.

The decision to open up Apple’s “right to repair” might not have been entirely that of the company – the Federal Trade Commission wrote to the corporation earlier this year vowing to “address unlawful repair restrictions,” adding it would also “stand ready to work with legislators, either at the state or federal level, in order to ensure that consumers have choices when they need to repair products that they purchase and own.”

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EXPERT OPINION — More than 200 U.S. officers have been hunted around the globe and targeted by an adversary using a mysterious weapon that causes permanent brain injury. It’s time to get serious about fighting back.

The Authors:

Paul Kolbe served for 25 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. He is currently Director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Marc Polymeropoulos worked for the CIA for 26 years. He is author of “Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA.

John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.

Prior to 9/11, al Qaida declared war on the United States, bombed the USS Cole, and blew up U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. Despite heavy casualties, America viewed successive al Qaida terrorist attacks as somehow unique, not representative of a larger threat or state of war. We went about our business and failed to take hard action against al Qaida despite clear warning. Our failure to respond forcefully led to 9/11 and the two decades of war that followed.

Fast forward to today.  Since 2016, more than 200 U.S. officials have reportedly suffered from a mysterious series of symptoms which have caused long-lasting, debilitating injuries. Suffering from searing headaches, vertigo, vision impairment, and nausea, many victims have been formally diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and other leading hospitals. Family members and young children have suffered as well. Some medical tests can now confirm the markers of brain injury, similar to those suffered by victims of concussive injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These injuries began with a cluster of reports from Cuba in 2016 and have become commonly referred to as Havana Syndrome. Moscow, Vienna, Belgrade, and Hanoi are among more than a dozen cities where U.S. officials reportedly have been attacked and injured. In residences, on the street, in vehicles, and even at secure U.S. facilities, U.S. officers are being hunted. Stunningly, even a close aide to CIA Director Bill Burns was reportedly attacked on a trip to India just this past August.

The CIA, after a period of confusion, delay, and even denial at times, now appears to take these threats very seriously. CIA Director Burns and Deputy Director David Cohen have publicly stated that U.S. officials are being “attacked.” They have improved health care for CIA officers who are hurt. And an agency task force is hard at work trying to obtain additional intelligence on those responsible. We credit Director Burns for his solid leadership.

The cause of these injuries? The National Academy of Sciences has pointed to Directed Energy Weapons – devices which emit microwave pulses which can inflict pain and damage tissue. The United States, Russia, China, and others have all developed Directed Energy Weapons to destroy equipment, counter drones, and control crowds. This is not science fiction.

Directed energy weapons would account for the highly directional and locational nature of these incidents. When victims can “move off the x,” the signature sounds, sensations, and pain that goes with the attacks often stop, though damage has already occurred. The amount of exposure seems to affect the degree of injury. Other technologies could be at play and are being investigated, but microwaves appear to be the most likely vector. Russia has used them before, flooding the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with microwave radiation for decades.

Regardless of form, the weapons being used in these attacks are nothing less than weapons of terror, designed to cause injury to non-combatants. Who would use such a weapon to attack U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel, and to what conceivable end?

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CIA Deputy Director Cohen stated at a recent intelligence summit, that the U.S. was closer to identifying the culprit, and Politico has reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are increasingly convinced that Russia or another hostile adversary is behind the attack, although reportedly, no smoking gun has been found.

As former CIA operations officers with extensive experience dealing with both counterterrorism and counterintelligence issues, we have few doubts about who will be named as the culprit. For at least a decade, Russia has conducted itself as in a state of conflict with the West in general and the United States in particular. Russia has launched cyberattacks impacting critical infrastructure and supply chains, assassinated opponents with nuclear poisons and chemical weapons, gunned down people in the streets using criminal proxies, sabotaged a Czech ammunition depot, and mounted a violent coup attempt in Montenegro. It has also bombarded the U.S. embassy in Moscow with microwave radiation and used carcinogenic “spy dust” without regard to health effects. The attacks on U.S. officials would fit this pattern of behavior.

We recognize that it is important to let the intelligence community do its job and its findings must inform policy action. Congress and the administration must work together to formulate a range of possible responses and it is not too early to begin. As Senator Collins and others have stated, these attacks are “an act of war,” and as such, preparation for a future attribution call by the national security establishment is in order. So how could the U.S. respond?

Let’s start with what doesn’t work – sanctions. Sanctions feel good and satisfy an action imperative but they are feckless. Sanctions have not stopped Russia from killing dissidents, halted the Nordstream II pipeline, compelled a pull back from occupied territories, reduced support for tyrants, or hindered oil and gas production. Sanctions have simply forced Russia to develop more creative money laundering and sanction circumvention mechanisms.

So, what would work? For starters, we must understand that the Putin regime considers itself in a state of conflict with the U.S., short of war, but nonetheless deadly real. We are dealing with a state sponsor of terror which conducts operations across the globe to weaken the U.S. abroad, divide it from its allies, and sow discord at home. Our policy must be calibrated to win this conflict, without sparking a shooting war, but at risk of one.

Russia understands reciprocity and strength. When four Russian diplomats were kidnapped by extremists in Beirut in 1985, and one of them was killed, Russia reportedly responded by kidnapping and gruesomely killing a relative of the group’s leader. The surviving diplomats were released immediately. The story may be apocryphal, but it does illustrate the Russian approach. Tempting as it may be for America to retaliate tit for tat, we need not mirror Russia’s actions. Instead, we should play to our greater economic, diplomatic, and military advantages.

We offer five elements to frame a response: enlist U.S. allies, expand forward deterrence, limit the adversary’s reach, choke off money, and bring those accountable to justice.

NATO: With proof of the attacks on U.S. officials, we should activate NATO’s Article Five collective defense clause. The only other time this was enacted was after 9/11. As justification, in addition to the Havana Syndrome attacks, (which also caused Canadian casualties), we would include GRU and FSB assassination operations across Europe, deadly sabotage in the Czech Republic, a coup attempt in Montenegro, persistent cyberattacks, and a litany of other actions that can only be described as irregular warfare directed against NATO members.

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Forward Presence: A crystal clear signal that we understand the nature of Russian hybrid warfare and are responding would be to enhance our deployed military presence in Poland, the Baltic States, and in the Black Sea region. These units would pose no offensive threat to Russia but would be a clear signal that the U.S. is prepared to counter any Russian shenanigans. We should also significantly ramp up our lethal aid and training to the Ukraine, where the nature of Russian aggression is well known. Weakness in Eastern Europe is an invitation to conflict.

Travel and Presence: We should drastically limit Russian business and tourist travel which is being used as cover for FSB and GRU operations. We would reduce Russian diplomatic presence in each capital to the bare minimum – handfuls not hundreds. American and European counterintelligence experts believe there are more Russian intelligence officers operating from embassies than during the Cold War. Limiting the size of Russia’s espionage infrastructure will complicate the planning and execution of all of its intelligence operations.

Finance: A key tool in counterterrorism operations is the ability to target sources of finance which constitute material support to terrorism. In this case, we would apply that principle to the Russian government, state enterprises, and individuals who provide cover, tools, and sources of funding to Russia’s campaign to undermine the West with violence, terror, and media manipulation. Russia’s dirty money has been used to undermine the west and poison our politics. We should limit the easy access of shady money to western banks.

Criminal Cases: We need bring war crime cases to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. Following a decade of conflict in the Balkans, the ICJ brought to justice 161 indicted Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian war criminals. This was an astounding success – a manhunt which included American and European law enforcement and intelligence services. Just as in Nuremberg after World War II, these actions to hold war criminals accountable drew a line in the sand.

This is a start.  Successive Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued Russia policies which represent the triumph of hope over experience. We have treated the symptoms of malign Russian actions rather than the underlying pathology. It is now time to finally acknowledge that we are in a long-term hybrid conflict and forget the fantasy of changing Putin’s behavior. Only a new regime in the Kremlin would hold the hope of bringing about a change in actions. Eventually, the Putin regime will wither or collapse, but until it does, we and our allies must do a better job of defending ourselves.

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Sporadic clashes broke out at massive Saturday demonstrations in major European cities, as thousands of people took to the streets of Vienna, Paris and Rome to express their discontent with Covid-19 restrictions.

The Austrian capital Vienna on Saturday saw the largest protest turnout since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 38,000 people took to the city streets to join a dozen demonstrations protesting government measures.

The protests came a day after the Austrian authorities ordered nationwide compulsory vaccination from February 1 and imposed a full lockdown, starting Monday. The massive procession that spanned over several kilometers marched along Vienna’s central ring road. The city center was paralyzed for several hours as traffic was restricted.

Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party, whose members joined the rallies, put the number of protesters at 100,000. Some demonstrations were also attended by members of various far-right groups. The protests were generally peaceful but footage published by Ruptly video news agency showed several scuffles between the police and the demonstrators breaking out.

Law enforcement spoke of a total of five arrests. One incident saw a protester attempting to grab an officer’s gun and take it from its holster. In another incident, the officers were pelted with bottles and fireworks and had to use pepper spray in response.

Hundreds of kilometers away from Vienna, in the French capital Paris, events took a more dramatic turn. There, a demonstration against the government Covid-19 measures coincided with the third anniversary of the Yellow Vests movement. Hundreds of protesters took part in the protest, which quickly turned into clashes between the demonstrators and law enforcement.

The protesters were building barricades and setting them on fire as well as pelting police with bottles and various other projectiles. Law enforcement responded with profuse amounts of tear gas, sometimes filling entire streets with thick smoke to disperse the crowds.

Rome saw a massive demonstration against Italy’s Covid-19 health pass, also known as the Green Pass. Some 4,000 people gathered in the center of the Italian capital, according to the police. The demonstrators were waving national flags and chanting “Freedom” and “No Green Pass,” referring to the vaccination certificate needed to enter various public venues such as clubs or bars.

The crowd staged a sit-in in the Circus Maximus – an ancient Roman chariot-racing stadium converted into a modern-day park. They remained there after sunset, lighting the area with thousands of phones and colored smoke bombs. The rally was peaceful, though, as the police did not report any incidents.

Unlike Rome, Italy’s northern city of Milano saw clashes between protesters and the police as law enforcement officers sought to break up an unauthorized rally at the city center. Large police forces were deployed to the city center and several squares were cordoned off.

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This piece was first published by RUSI in London.  The views do not represent those of RUSI.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE –The international community is coming under increasing pressure to recognise the Taliban and to unfreeze Afghan funds held by the IMF or to risk a humanitarian crisis over the winter and a resurgence of international terrorism.

As Afghanistan heads deeper into winter the desperate need is to avoid a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Programme has launched an appeal to feed up to 23 million people and Médecins sans Frontières have followed suit in the healthcare field. Fortunately, the distribution mechanisms are in place inside Afghanistan; what is needed is for the international community to ensure that UN humanitarian programmes are fully funded. This will require Western capitals to get over the shock of their recent defeat. It goes without saying that hunger and health should not be used as instruments of political leverage.

Meanwhile, it is becoming ever more apparent that the Taliban do not have the skills to administer a country which is far more complex than the Afghanistan of 1996 – when they began their previous and disastrous spell in office. They will need international assistance to stabilise the economy, get people back to work and, in time, continue the gradual infrastructure improvements which have been underway since 2002. China will doubtless be willing to assist in some areas but Beijing has already made clear that it is adopting a cautious, gradualist approach. However, there are emerging indications that the Taliban’s intransigent views are beginning to relax; such as their approval of the polio vaccination scheme and their willingness to work with UN humanitarian agencies.

The Taliban will also need outside help in defeating the threat from the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISK). Already the Taliban are finding it difficult to counter similar asymmetric tactics which they used so successfully against Western forces. This is likely one of the subjects which CIA Director William Burns discussed with the Taliban during his visit on 24 August and where there is a mutual interest.

What can the international community (not just the West) realistically expect from the Taliban, following the militant group’s stunning victory? Maximalist demands will inevitably get short shrift.

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First, the Taliban should form a more inclusive government. According to multiple sources, the Taliban were intending to form such an administration had Ashraf Ghani not fled the country on 15 August. I am sceptical that this was ever their intention but former president Hamid Karzai and former reconciliation chief Abdullah Abdullah may have remained in Kabul on this understanding and Fatima Gailani, a former negotiator, insists this was the Taliban’s intention.

An inclusive government would need to include women and non-Taliban representatives from the Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik communities. It need not comprise the failed politicians and bloodstained warlords of the past, least of all Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rashid Dostum. It is surely time for a new generation of more technocratic Afghans to become involved in government. Some may be persuaded to return from abroad but they will need assurances for their safety.

Second, the international community should insist on female education at all levels be restored and for women to play a fuller role in society. The Taliban will baulk at this but they only need to look at Pakistan where women play an important role in an avowedly Islamic, if not Islamist, society.

Third, all neighbouring countries, as well as the wider world, want Afghanistan to commit to removing all terrorist bases and terrorists from its soil; not just ISK and Al-Qa’ida but also the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), anti-Iranian and anti-Indian groups, and Central Asian militant movements including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

Fourth, the Taliban should commit to allow people to join their families in exile if they wish and also cease the continuing search for and punishment of those Afghans who served the Afghan government and Western allies since 2001.

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In an ideal world there would also be a fifth request: to remove Haqqani network members from the Taliban administration. However, that pass was sold when the US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad engaged with the Haqqanis in Doha – another result of that calamitous dialogue. Furthermore, the current reality is that the Haqqanis control both Kabul and its airport and Sirajuddin Haqqani holds the key position of interior minister.

Instead, the Haqqanis need to be persuaded to prevent Al-Qa’ida regrouping in Afghanistan. Sirajuddin’s father was close to Osama bin Laden and the group retains its Al-Qa’ida connections. Pakistan is already using the Haqqanis to bring the TTP to the negotiating table. It remains to be seen how successful this will be. It is doubtful that the Haqqanis would be willing to take military action against a group from a similar area in the tribal borderlands. However, the Haqqanis could be useful as intermediaries, if not as enforcers.

Meanwhile, the wider Taliban, usually referred to as the ‘Kandaharis’, are increasingly exasperated by the entryist Haqqanis. Although they have worked together, there was never much love lost between the two. The Kandaharis have always distrusted the Haqqanis’ proximity to the Pakistani military. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul-Ghani Baradar, whose willingness to negotiate with the Kabul government in 2008 and 2010 earned him eight years in a Pakistani prison, has been sidelined. There will doubtless be a reckoning

A lasting regret of the US’s careless withdrawal is that Washington did not conclude a broader settlement for Afghanistan involving China, Iran, Russia, India and the Central Asian Republics. From now on it is essential to include all the neighbours in the discussion of recognition and the conditions required. But first the Afghans must be helped to survive the winter.

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Slovakia has become the latest European country to implement lockdown restrictions on people who haven’t had the Covid vaccine, as it seeks to prevent a resurgence in infections and hospital admissions over the winter.

Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced the new measures in a press conference on Thursday, declaring a “lockdown for the unvaccinated” after the country reported a record number of new cases.

The new restrictions in Slovakia, which come into effect on Monday, will require people to have been vaccinated or have recovered from Covid in the past six months to enter restaurants, non-essential shops, or public events.

In the past few days, the European nation has seen record numbers of new infections, including over 8,000 on Tuesday, with hospitals running out of space to treat Covid patients.

Slovakia has one of the lowest rates of vaccination in the European Union, with over 50% of individuals still not jabbed. The country of around 5.5 million has so far only inoculated 2.5 million people against the virus.

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(FILE PHOTO) © REUTERS/David W Cerny
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Earlier this week, Austria became the first nation to impose restrictions on unvaccinated individuals, as it sought to limit pressure on hospitals and emergency care units. The move came into effect at midnight on Monday for anyone aged 12 and older who has not received their Covid vaccine or recently recovered from the virus.

The German state of Bavaria and the Czech Republic followed Austria in restricting access for unvaccinated individuals. Only people who can show proof of vaccination or that they have recently recovered from Covid will be allowed to enter public spaces, such as restaurants and shops. 

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Hundreds of major websites returned ‘404: not found’ errors after an apparent problem with Google Cloud. Alphabet said the problem was “partially resolved” after about ten minutes, but it will take time for everything to update.

The site Downdetector began showing a spike in reports of outages starting at 12:40pm Eastern time on Tuesday, affecting Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, and TikTok, as well as e-commerce sites Target, Etsy, Shopify, and Home Depot, among others.

Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Cloudflare were also affected.

Google’s Status Dashboard reported an unspecified “issue” with the Cloud service starting at 10:10 Pacific, which was causing users to encounter errors when accessing websites. 

“We believe the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved,” the company said by 10:17 PST, but it added that “Customers will be unable to apply changes to their load balancers until the issue is fully resolved,” and they did not have an estimate as to when that might be.

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A stream literally flowing with booze emitting a strong beery odor has been discovered in one of the tropical islands of Hawaii. Its waters have been apparently contaminated with alcohol after a leak at a beverage warehouse.

A small river with a distinctive alcoholic smell was recently found on the island of Oahu, some 15 miles (24 kilometers) away from Honolulu, Hawaiian capital. Its waters have been flowing through the Waipio valley and even turned into a 100-foot (30 meters) waterfall on their way.  

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Image from geosociety.org
​‘Plastic stones’ found at remote Hawaii beach

The stream caught the attention of local environmental activists, who noticed the smell in the area.

“The other day we came here you would think it was a beer pub that hadn’t opened its doors for three or four days,” activist Carroll Cox told local Hawaii News Now. She also contacted the Department of Health about the issue.

Local media took samples from the unusual stream and had them checked at a private laboratory. It tested positive for alcohol, containing 1.2% percent of the substance in its waters – nearly a quarter the content in regular beer and strong enough to cause a buzz.

Local health authorities got involved, and an investigation into the source of contamination was launched. It was learned that the stream was coming from a drain pipe that was traced back to a warehouse of Hawaii’s largest liquor distributor, Paradise Beverages. Its representatives told local media they were working with officials to eliminate a possible spill, with the booze river apparently closing its free drinks service.

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Scientists have used an AI tool to identify which animals are most likely to contract and spread mutated versions of Covid-19. The model highlighted both pets and wild animals as likely reservoirs for the virus.

Using information about their habitats and various biological traits, researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York developed the machine learning tool to figure out which animals had the particular ACE2 protein that the coronavirus was most likely to latch onto. 

Out of 5,400 tested, the scientists narrowed it down to 540 mammalian species.

Some of its predictions have been previously documented as transmission risks, for instance, dogs, cats and bats, while farm animals like pigs and exotic zoo animals were surprise additions.

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FILE PHOTO: People cross the tarmac of the airport in front of the Rock of Gibraltar in the British Overseas territory of Gibraltar, June 24, 2021 © Reuters / Jon Nazca
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Other expected additions are minks, Sunda pangolins, and 35 species of bats – which are together ranked among the top 10% of animals most likely to spread the virus, in line with lab results. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal, also ranked water buffalo, a number of primates, including gorillas and 76 rodent species as being more susceptible to infection.

The researchers taught the AI to identify patterns between rates of transmission and some 60 ecological and biological traits collected by earlier studies, including the overlap between the animal and human habitats as well as their respective lifespans, diets, and sizes.

Previously, the specific amino acid sequences had only been mapped out in around 300 species, including about 143 mammals — and figuring out which ones are more prone to infection is key to predicting the spread of the virus, researchers said.

Arinjay Banerjee at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada told the New Scientist that the results will help researchers “track viral infections and the possible emergence of animal-adapted coronavirus variants” around the world. Barbara Han, who led the study, said predictions needed to be followed up with systematic surveillance and lab studies.

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Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable, Colombia’s president Ivan Duque has insisted, after photos of police academy cadets dressed up in Third Reich uniforms were uploaded online, causing outrage.

“Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable,” Duque stated in a tweet on Friday. The president said he condemned any references to those who were “responsible for the Jewish Holocaust that claimed the lives of more than 6 million people,” adding that “anti-Semitism has no place in the world.”

Duque had earlier made demands for “heads to roll” at an academy that “promotes such criminal practices,” with its director, Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Ferney Bayona Sanchez, already having been sacked.

Colombia’s defense ministry, which oversees the country’s police, also insisted in a statement that that its training programs “don’t envisage in any way an activity such as the one which took place” at the academy.

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Nazi uniforms found inside the house of a man suspected of raping a 12-year-old boy at the Vargem Grande neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. © AFP / Rio de Janeiro Civil Police
Brazilian police discover $3.5mn trove of Nazi memorabilia at home of ‘insane psychopath’ suspected of child rape

The images of police cadets in Nazi uniforms caused anger and bewilderment among internet users.

The German and Israeli embassies in the country reacted by issuing a joint statement, in which they expressed “total rejection of any form of apology or demonstration of Nazism.” The US embassy in Bogota also said that it was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by the development.

The controversial images, in which aspiring officers were caught sporting black SS outfits with red swastika armbands and grey Wehrmacht uniforms from the World War II era, weren’t revealed in some bombshell media report, but were actually published on the official Twitter account of the Colombian police this Thursday.

The photos were taken as part of a “cultural exchange” event at the police academy in the city of Tulua, aimed at commemorating Germany and “strengthening the knowledge of our police students.” The cosplay was apparently intended to illustrate the history of German law enforcement, with more cadets pictured wearing more modern versions of the country’s police uniforms in the pictures.

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A Roadmap for AI in the Intelligence Community

(Editor’s Note: This article was first published by our friends at Just Security and is the fourth in a series that is diving into the foundational barriers to the broad integration of AI in the IC – culture, budget, acquisition, risk, and oversight.  This article considers a new IC approach to risk management.)

OPINION — I have written previously that the Intelligence Community (IC) must rapidly advance its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to keep pace with our nation’s adversaries and continue to provide policymakers with accurate, timely, and exquisite insights. The good news is that there is strong bipartisan support for doing so. The not-so-good news is that the IC is not well-postured to move quickly and take the risks required to continue to outpace China and other strategic competitors over the next decade.

In addition to the practical budget and acquisition hurdles facing the IC, there is a strong cultural resistance to taking risks when not absolutely necessary. This is understandable given the life-and-death nature of intelligence work and the U.S. government’s imperative to wisely execute national security funds and activities. However, some risks related to innovative and cutting-edge technologies like AI are in fact necessary, and the risk of inaction – the costs of not pursuing AI capabilities – is greater than the risk of action.

The Need for a Risk Framework

For each incredible new invention, there are hundreds of brilliant ideas that have failed. To entrepreneurs and innovators, “failure” is not a bad word. Rather, failed ideas are often critical steps in the learning process that ultimately lead to a successful product; without those prior failed attempts, that final product might never be created. As former President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam once said, “FAIL” should really stand for “First Attempt In Learning.”

The U.S. government, however, is not Silicon Valley; it does not consider failure a useful part of any process, especially when it comes to national security activities and taxpayer dollars. Indeed, no one in the U.S. government wants to incur additional costs or delay or lose taxpayer dollars. But there is rarely a distinction made within the government between big failures, which may have a lasting, devastating, and even life-threatening impact, and small failures, which may be mere stumbling blocks with acceptable levels of impact that result in helpful course corrections.

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As a subcommittee report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) notes “[p]rogram failures are often met with harsh penalties and very public rebukes from Congress which often fails to appreciate that not all failures are the same. Especially with cutting-edge research in technologies … early failures are a near certainty …. In fact, failing fast and adapting quickly is a critical part of innovation.” There is a vital difference between an innovative project that fails and a failure to innovate. The former teaches us something we did not know before, while the latter is a national security risk.

Faced with congressional hearings, inspector general reports, performance evaluation downgrades, negative reputational effects, and even personal liability, IC officers are understandably risk-averse and prefer not to introduce any new risk. That is, of course, neither realistic nor the standard the IC meets today. The IC is constantly managing a multitude of operational risks – that its officers, sources, or methods will be exposed, that it will miss (or misinterpret) indications of an attack, or that it will otherwise fail to produce the intelligence policymakers need at the right time and place. Yet in the face of such serious risks, the IC proactively and aggressively pursues its mission. It recognizes that it must find effective ways to understand, mitigate, and make decisions around risk, and therefore it takes action to make sure potential ramifications are clear, appropriate, and accepted before any failure occurs. In short, the IC has long known that its operations cannot be paralyzed by a zero-risk tolerance that is neither desirable nor attainable. This recognition must also be applied to the ways in which the IC acquires, develops, and uses new technology.

This is particularly important in the context of AI. While AI has made amazing progress in recent years, the underlying technology, the algorithms and their application, are still evolving and the resulting capabilities, by design, will continue to learn and adapt. AI holds enormous promise to transform a variety of IC missions and tasks, but how and when these changes may occur is difficult to forecast and AI’s constant innovation will introduce uncertainty and mistakes. There will be unexpected breakthroughs, as well as failures in areas that initially seemed promising.

The IC must rethink its willingness to take risks in a field where change and failure is embraced as part of the key to future success. The IC must experiment and iterate its progress over time and shift from a culture that punishes even reasonable risk to one that embraces, mitigates, and owns it. This can only be done with a systematic, repeatable, and consistent approach to making risk-conscious decisions.

Today there is no cross-IC mechanism for thinking about risk, let alone for taking it. When considering new activities or approaches, each IC element manages risk through its own lens and mechanisms, if at all. Several individual IC elements have created internal risk assessment frameworks to help officers understand the risks of both action and inaction, and to navigate the decisions they are empowered to make depending upon the circumstances. These frameworks increase confidence that if an activity goes wrong, supervisors all the way up the chain will provide backing as long as the risk was reasonable, well-considered and understood, and the right leaders approved it. And while risk assessments are often not precise instruments of measurement – they reflect the quality of the data, the varied expertise of those conducting the assessments, and the subjective interpretation of the results – regularized and systematic risk assessments are nevertheless a key part of effective risk management and facilitate decision-making at all levels.

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Creating these individual frameworks is commendable and leading-edge for government agencies, but more must be done holistically across the IC. Irregular and inconsistent risk assessments among IC elements will not provide the comfort and certainty needed to drive an IC-wide cultural shift to taking risk. At the same time, the unique nature of the IC, comprised of 18 different elements, each with similar and overlapping, but not identical, missions, roles, authorities, threats and vulnerabilities, does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all approach.

For this reason, the IC needs a flexible but common strategic framework for considering risk that can apply across the community, with each element having the ability to tailor that framework to its own mission space. Such an approach is not unlike how the community is managed in many areas today – with overarching IC-wide policy that is locally interpreted and implemented to fit the specific needs of each IC element. When it comes to risk, creating an umbrella IC-wide framework will significantly improve the workforce’s ability to understand acceptable risks and tradeoffs, produce comprehensible and comparable risk determinations across the IC, and provide policymakers the ability to anticipate and mitigate failure and unintended escalation.

Critical Elements of a Risk Framework

A common IC AI risk framework should inform and help prioritize decisions from acquisition or development, to deployment, to performance in a consistent way across the IC. To start, the IC should create common AI risk management principles, like its existing principles of transparency and AI ethics, that include clear and consistent definitions, thresholds, and standards. These principles should drive a repeatable risk assessment process that each IC element can tailor to its individual needs, and should promote policy, governance, and technological approaches that are aligned to risk management.

The successful implementation of this risk framework requires a multi-disciplinary approach involving leaders from across the organization, experts from all relevant functional areas, and managers who can ensure vigilance in implementation. A whole-of-activity methodology that includes technologists, collectors, analysts, innovators, security officers, acquisition officers, lawyers and more, is critical to ensuring a full 360-degree understanding of the opportunities, issues, risks, and potential consequences associated with a particular action, and to enabling the best-informed decision.

Given the many players involved, each IC element must strengthen internal processes to manage the potential disconnects that can lead to unintended risks and to create a culture that instills in every officer a responsibility to proactively consider risk at each stage of the activity. Internal governance should include an interdisciplinary Risk Management Council (RMC) made up of senior leaders from across the organization. The RMC should establish clear and consistent thresholds for when a risk assessment is required, recommended, or not needed given that resource constraints likely will not allow all of the broad and diverse AI activities within organizations to be assessed. These thresholds should be consistent with the IC risk management principles so that as IC elements work together on projects across the community, officers have similar understandings and expectations.

The risk framework itself should provide a common taxonomy and process to:

  • Understand and identify potential failures, including the source, timeline, and range of effects.
  • Analyze failures and risks by identifying internal vulnerabilities or predisposing conditions that could increase the likelihood of adverse impact.
  • Evaluate the likelihood of failure, taking into consideration risks and vulnerabilities.
  • Assess the severity of the potential impact, to include potential harm to organizational operations, assets, individuals, other organizations, or the nation.
  • Consider whether the ultimate risk may be sufficiently mitigated or whether it should be transferred, avoided, or accepted.

AI-related risks may include, among other things, technology failure, biased data, adversarial attacks, supply chain compromises, human error, cost overruns, legal compliance challenges, or oversight issues.

An initial risk level is determined by considering the likelihood of a failure against the severity of the potential impact. For example, is there is a low, moderate, or high likelihood of supply chain compromise? Would such a compromise affect only one discrete system or are there system-wide implications? These calculations will result in an initial risk level. Then potential mitigation measures, such as additional policies, training, or security measures, are applied to lower the initial risk level to an adjusted risk level. For example, physically or logically segmenting an organization’s systems so that a compromise only touches one system would significantly decrease the risk level associated with that particular technology. The higher the likelihood of supply chain compromise, the lower the severity of its impact must be to offset the risk, and vice versa. Organizations should apply the Swiss Cheese Model of more than one preventative or mitigative action for a more effective layered defense. Organizations then must consider the adjusted risk level in relation to their tolerance for risk; how much risk (and potential consequence) is acceptable in pursuit of value? This requires defining the IC’s risk tolerance levels, within which IC elements may again define their own levels based upon their unique missions.

Understanding and considering the risk of action is an important step forward for the IC, but it is not the last step. Sometimes overlooked in risk assessment practices is the consideration of the risk of inaction. To fully evaluate potential options, decision-makers must consider whether the overall risk of doing something is outweighed by the risks of not doing it. If the IC does not pursue particular AI capabilities, what is the opportunity cost of that inaction? Any final determination about whether to take action must consider whether declining to act would cause greater risk of significant harm. While the answer will not always be yes, in the case of AI and emerging technology, it is a very realistic possibility.

And, finally, a risk framework only works if people know about it. Broad communication – about the existence of the framework, how to apply it, and expectations for doing so – is vital. We cannot hold people accountable for appropriately managing risk if we do not clearly and consistently communicate and help people use the structure and mechanisms for doing so.

Buy-in To Enhance Confidence

An IC-wide AI risk framework will help IC officers understand risks and determine when and how to take advantage of innovative emerging technologies like AI, increasing comfort with uncertainty and risk-taking in the pursuit of new capabilities. Such a risk framework will have even greater impact if it is accepted – explicitly or implicitly – by the IC’s congressional overseers. The final article in this series will delve more deeply into needed changes to further improve the crucial relationship between the IC and its congressional overseers. It will also provide a link to a full report that provides more detail on each aspect of the series, including a draft IC AI Risk Framework.

Although Congress is not formally bound by such a framework, given the significant accountability measures that often flow from these overseers, a meeting of the minds between the IC and its congressional overseers is critical. Indeed, these overseers should have awareness of and an informal ability to provide feedback into the framework as it is being developed. This level of transparency and partnership would lead to at least two important benefits: first, increased confidence in the framework by all; and second, better insight into IC decision-making for IC overseers.

Ultimately, such a mutual understanding would encourage exactly what the IC needs to truly take advantage of next-generation technology like AI: a culture of experimentation, innovation, and creativity that sees reasonable risk and failure as necessary steps to game-changing outcomes.

Read also AI and the IC: The Tangled Web of Budget and Acquisition

Read also Artificial Intelligence in the IC: Culture is Critical

Read also AI and the IC: The Challenges Ahead

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