THE FOURTH INTELLIGENCE REVOLUTION

Predictions and recommendations from a former intelligence officer.

Co-opting a Leon Trotsky quote, Vinci declares: “You may not be interested in intelligence, but intelligence is deeply interested in you.” Drawing on decades of experience at the nexus of technology, intelligence, and foreign affairs—decades the United States spent unfurling from the hypersecrecy and compartmentalization of the Cold War into the new challenges of a post-9/11 world—the author examines how war between (and therefore intelligence about and among) adversaries has shifted from the physical and material to the virtual, technology-dependent world of commercial satellites, AI, and autonomous drones. Threats surge across use of the internet, semiconductors, and smartphone apps from totalitarian systems, most ominously, China. Foreign powers, already adept at controlling their own populations, are now surreptitiously pursuing complete surveillance and manipulation of influential corporations and all American citizens. The U.S. needs to be better at mining social media and open-source data, mimicking the efficiency and radical sight of the private sector, revealing and protecting truth from misinformation campaigns, and preventing potentially adversarial uses of breakthrough technology. The nation’s current infrastructure is woefully inadequate for this pressing task, and many aspects of Vinci’s proposed solution is almost as bleak as the problem it proposes to address: individualized AI “bodyguards,” a Wikipedia-inspired information-sharing platform, and a corps of “citizen spies” comprised of us all. Throughout the text, the author’s case is meticulously argued and made compellingly urgent, with each danger piling onto the previous with ominous, dizzying significance. However, with only cursory treatment of the historical distrust of American intelligence and almost no discussion of the increasing proliferation of doubt and disconnection, his call to transformative action, fundamentally dependent on civil confidence and cohesion, can feel romantic and lofty, leaving the reader with a deepening sense of paranoia and dread.

A head-spinning and disorienting forecast.