Amy Zegart
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Cedric von Niederhausern / The Atlantic American Spies Are Fighting the Last War, Again
When the Cold War ended, the intelligence community failed to adapt. Today it faces a similar challenge.
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Adam Maida None of My Students Remember 9/11
For coming generations of students, September 11 is history rather than memory. How does that affect how they learn about it?
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The Atlantic Everybody Spies in Cyberspace. The U.S. Must Plan Accordingly.
Because all countries engage in espionage, intrusions like Russia’s latest data hack are devilishly hard to deter.
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Jason Lee / Reuters The Race for Big Ideas Is On
The United States faces genuinely new global challenges—but tries to understand them using outmoded theories from a bygone era.
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Alexander Steam / Timofeev Vladimir / Dean Drobot … The Self-Appointed Spies Who Use Google Earth to Sniff Out Nukes
Nuclear intelligence isn’t just for government agencies anymore. A motley crew of outside watchdogs has found creative ways to deter proliferation.
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Jim Bourg / Reuters The Whistle-Blower Really Knows How to Write
As an intelligence report, the complaint against Trump holds up well. The author carefully explained where the information came from and left investigators a number of concrete leads.
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Mario Tama / Getty In the Deepfake Era, Counterterrorism Is Harder
After failing to detect the 9/11 plot, spy agencies reinvented themselves for an age of terrorism, but a new generation of technological threats requires a new round of reforms.
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Mike Segar / Reuters Debate Moderators Don’t Know Much About National Security
Candidates are seldom pressed to discuss the biggest foreign-policy challenges a president will actually face.
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Bobbi Zapka / U.S. Air Force via Reuters Not All Drones Are Created Equal
Autonomous-weapons systems won’t be the spark that leads to war with Iran or any other country. Human decisions might be.
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Jacques Langevin / Sygma via Getty Decades of Being Wrong About China Should Teach Us Something
American analysts keep trying to fit the country into familiar patterns—ignoring the many ways in which it’s an exception.
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Joshua Roberts / Reuters The Battle for American Minds
Russia’s 2016 election interference was only the beginning. New tactics and deep fakes are probably coming soon.
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Joshua Roberts / Reuters America’s Misbegotten Cyber Strategy
The Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy rests on a pair of convenient fictions.
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Rick Wilking / Reuters The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National-Security Threat
Closing the gap between technology leaders and policy makers will require a radically different approach from the defense establishment.
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AP George Washington Was a Master of Deception
The Founding Fathers relied on deceit in championing American independence—and that has lessons for the present.
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Jim Bourg / Reuters Trump Says Russia Isn’t Still Targeting the U.S.—But He’s Wrong
Putin’s government is waging information warfare against America, but the president is ignoring his intelligence advisers as they sound the alarm.
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Reinhard Krause / Reuters The Self-Inflicted Demise of American Power
The effect of Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine can be summed up as “Make America Weak Again.”
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The Presidential Blue House / Reuters A Prime Opportunity to Get Inside Kim Jong Un’s Head
Preparing for a summit with North Korea is allowing the U.S. to gain insight into an opaque regime. And there’s more good news, too.
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AP The 'First Woman CIA Director' Is a Smokescreen
Gina Haspel's gender is the least important fact about her.
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Joshua Roberts / Reuters Devin Nunes's Fake Oversight
The House Intelligence Committee chairman’s actions are toxic to the democratic process and dangerous to American national security.
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Damir Sagolj / Reuters The Specter of a Chinese Mole in America
The case of a suspected turncoat couldn’t come at a worse time for the intelligence community.
