Amy Zegart is the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. She teaches and writes about intelligence challenges, congressional oversight, and national security policy. Her books include Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11, and Flawed by Design, which chronicles the development of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Council. From 1999 to 2011, she was a public policy professor at UCLA. She also spent four years as a McKinsey & Company management consultant. Follow her on Twitter @AmyZegart
Subscribe to this Lawfare contributor via RSS.
Today the Brookings Institution is publishing our edited volume, "Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations." And here is the first intro
It is still the early days following the events of Orlando. It is possible that, as facts emerge, it will be clear that there was nothing more the FBI could have done to prevent the attack. However, there are lessons to be learned on from the 2009 attack in Fort Hood regarding which questions we should be asking. I have a forthcoming chapter in a book on insider threats (edited by Scott Sagan and Matt Bunn, Cornell Univ. Press) which examines where the FBI went wrong in preventing the Fort Hood attack and why.
The escalating war of words between Apple and the FBI is widely seen as a “security vs. privacy” dilemma. But it’s much more than that. This is also fundamentally a security vs. security dilemma. Lost in this conversation is a more serious discussion of what we as a society value more: our security interests in maximizing the prospects of successful law enforcement investigations (including investigations of terrorist attacks) or our security interests in maximizing U.S. power on the world stage by ensuring the American tech industry continues to thrive.
A quick response without getting into the weeds about why I find Senator Feinstein's post so disheartening. Let me be clear: I agree with her normative position that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" were morally wrong. Full stop. I have tremendous respect for Sen. Feinstein and the committee.
Who won the torture debate -- the CIA or Senate Intelligence Committee Report? Were waterboarding, rectal hydration, stress positions, and other techniques used against detainees effective? Legal? Ethical? In a forthcoming special issue of the journal Intelligence and National Security, a range of academics and one former CIA lawyer weigh in.
Jack gave a terrific rapid reaction to the DNI's 2015 annual threat assessment, delivered last Thursday. Here, I wanted to add a few more brief thoughts comparing this assessment to previous ones.
First, the rank ordering of global threats remained almost exactly the same in 2015 as it did in 2014. The top six threats are identical. The bottom two cover many of the same topics as last year, but with different names.