US spy chief wants intel community to get away from building its own tech

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday that she wants the federal government to pivot away from developing its own in-house solutions and rely more on the private sector to supply technologies needed for spies and analysts.

Under her leadership, “I want to get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself because it’s really not what the government is best at doing, but really focusing on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can, so that our workforce can really focus on the things that we are very good at and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill,” she said.

The remarks, delivered Tuesday at a fireside chat at the Amazon Web Services annual public sector conference in Washington, D.C., are some of the first from Gabbard that directly addressed the private sector tech workforce, which for years has provided powerful and secretive tools to the nation’s 18 intelligence offices.

Amazon, which used her address as a way to underscore that relationship, has already supplied core agencies like the NSA and CIA with enormous systems to store and exchange information in classified spaces. Other tech giants have done the same.

The U.S. spy community and other security offices have for at least the last two decades relied heavily on contractor clients to improve and augment in-house capabilities to eavesdrop, hunt for cyberthreats and analyze troves of data. Gabbard’s remarks, however, appear to frame the relationship as a departure from a yearslong dynamic where agencies have, in many cases, built their own systems to carry out missions.

A decade ago, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the signals intelligence titan used an internal program called XKeyscore to intercept, store and query internet communications in real-time, relying on agency-run infrastructure from monitoring devices placed at key chokepoints around the internet backbone.

And in 2017, the Vault7 leaks revealed a trove of CIA hacking capabilities — including tools like HammerDrill and other USB-based intrusion methods — designed largely by the agency’s Embedded Development Branch.

Gabbard is not the first to touch on this relationship. Avril Haines, the former DNI under then-President Joe Biden, said last year that the private sector “increasingly possesses certain unique and specialized talent, knowledge and capabilities in key fields of critical importance to national security that we don’t have access to in the government.”

Asked about how artificial intelligence is being used under her leadership since being confirmed, Gabbard said that AI tools helped scan thousands of documents released in a recent declassification push pertaining to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

She also said they’ve helped staff pore through documents and files available in the open internet. 

“10,000 hours of media content, for example — that normally would take eight people 48 hours to comb through — now takes one person one hour, through the use of some of the AI tools that we have here.”

Gabbard has also notably pushed to create more unclassified spaces at Liberty Crossing, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s main campus in McLean, Virginia, arguing it’ll facilitate easier discussions with industry counterparts.

“It’s crazy that, you know, when we have people who need to go out and have a Zoom call with someone, they have to go sit in the car outside and take that call,” she said. “There are rules in place that make it very difficult for people who are working in the private sector to come in and meet with our professionals and have robust conversations about exactly this: What solutions are you bringing to our work to make it so that we can better accomplish our mission?”

Gabbard, whose appointment to lead the U.S. intelligence community was seen by many as unorthodox, is facing criticism after recently installing a top adviser in the IC Inspector General’s office — an unusual move that some former officials warned could compromise its integrity.

Her office has also drawn scrutiny after one of her top aides pushed analysts to rewrite an intelligence document so it could not be used against the Trump administration, the New York Times reported last month. The people involved in that intel report — which disputed the president’s claims about a Venezuelan gang vilified by the White House — were fired “because they politicized intelligence,” a representative from her office said at the time.

And in an ominous video posted Tuesday morning, Gabbard warned that the world was coming closer to a “nuclear annihilation” and said that “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” The video comes amid ongoing nuclear discussions between the U.S. and Iran.