Episode 14

Miah Hammond-Errey

TS EPISODE 14

Special Episode: Big Data, Emerging Technology & National Security Decision-Making Lecture

*Unfortunately, the episode we had planned to release today is still in production. Our guest was recalled to deal with a major cyber incident on the day of recording. This episode will hopefully be released soon.*

In this special episode of Technology and Security, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey talks about her book Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence National Security Disrupted, at ANU. This lecture covers big data and emerging technologies, their impacts on national security and how they create friction in national security decision-making. Big data isn't just a buzzword anymore; it's fundamentally altering the landscape of national security. Data abundance, digital connectivity, and ubiquitous technology form what I call the big data landscape. They are a trifecta shaping the future of national security.

This lecture highlights how the big data landscape and technologies like AI are broadening out and challenging our understanding of national security. It also shows that they are centralising informational, computation and commercial power. It then explores the way new technologies create friction in national security agencies and in policy-making process. Friction from within shows how intelligence and decision-making are impacted and friction from outside looks at the information environment.

Resources mentioned in the recording:

· Miah Hammond-Errey (2024) Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted (20% discount code for book AFL04)

· Jennifer Jackett (2023) Black Swan Strategy paper, Defence Innovation and The Australian National Interest

· Miah Hammond-Errey (2020) Chapter 18, Transformational Technology and Strategy In: N. Finney, ed., On Strategy,1st ed. Army University Press

· Miah Hammond-Errey (2024) Feb 2023, Secrecy, sovereignty and sharing: How data and emerging technologies are transforming intelligence.

· Blake Johnson, Miah Hammond-Errey, Daria Impiombato, Albert Zhang (2022) Suppressing the truth and spreading lies. How the CCP is influencing Solomon Islands’ information environment

· Miah Hammond-Errey (2023) Big data, emerging technologies and the characteristics of ‘good intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security
· Zedner, Lucia. 2009. Security (Routledge: London).· Véliz, Carissa. 2021. 'Privacy and digital ethics after the pandemic', Nature Electronics, 4: 10-11.
· Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security : a new framework for analysis (Boulder, Colo. : Lynne Rienner Pub. , 1998.).
· Kent, Sherman. 1966. Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J.,).

· Lowenthal, Mark M. 2012. Intelligence: from secrets to policy (SAGE/CQ Press: Los Angeles Thousand Oaks, California).

· Omand, David. 2010. Securing the state (Columbia University Press: New York).

This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and we pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging — here and wherever you’re listening. We acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Thanks to the talents of those involved. Recording by ANU, music by Dr Paul Mac and production by Elliott Brennan.

Transcript, check against delivery

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:00:02] Welcome to Technology and Security. TS is a podcast exploring the intersections of emerging technologies and national security. I'm your host, Doctor Miah Hammond-Errey. Today we are bringing you a special episode. Our planned guest was recalled to deal with a major cyber incident on the day of recording. The episode we had planned to release today is still under production and we hope to get it to you soon. So instead, we're bringing you a special episode. It’s a recording of a lecture I gave at the Australian National University on the impact of big data and emerging technologies on national security decision making. It’s based on my book, Big Data Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National security disrupted released by Routledge in January.

Prof Toni Erskine: [00:00:51] Good afternoon. My name is Toni Erskine, and I'm a Professor of international politics at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs here at the ANU. I'd like to begin by celebrating and paying my respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, ancestors and elders, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet this afternoon, and also extend that respect to First Nations peoples from elsewhere across this country. It's my absolute pleasure to welcome you today to the second seminar in a new seminar series on AI, Automated Systems and the Future of War. This is a project that's being generously funded by the Australian Department of Defence. I'm absolutely delighted to have Doctor Miah Hammond-Errey here with us this afternoon. And Miah's exciting research, I think, speaks to this theme in a number of respects. And actually, I don't think I can think of a better speaker to be part of this series. Just to tell you a little bit about Miah, her important work explores the intersection of emerging technology and security, and she's published widely on technology, intelligence, national security, and information warfare. Miah's forthcoming book is called Big Data Emerging Technologies and Intelligence. National Security Disrupted, and we need to all look out for that book. Miah will speak to us this afternoon on the impacts of big data and emerging technologies on national security and decision making. Miah, I think I'll pass over to you. Thank you so much for being here this afternoon. Thank you.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:02:30] I just want to start by also acknowledging we're on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Nambri people and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Thank you so much for inviting me, Toni, and for running this important series. Toni has asked me to kind of talk through some of my research to date. Um, given that list of topics, it might bounce around a little bit but I really hope that the threat of decision making and the sources of friction in that decision making process arising from emerging technologies, from inside that process and outside, will kind of hold that together. It's also a real pleasure to be back in Canberra and see so many familiar faces. So thanks everyone for coming. How many of you grew up without smartphones? Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:03:17] With dial up internet. How many of you remember a life pre-cloud where you stored files locally? A lot of us. Technology is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's really easy to forget that some of our devices and applications are relatively new, and many of the big tech companies we rely on are barely older than teenagers. Glenn Gerstell from the US National Security Agency wrote in 2019 that we all sense we are on the cusp of unimaginable technological changes. Cell phones and the internet seem of such manifest utility that we take them for granted, but that is only because they have become so central to our daily lives, not because they have been around forever. Google started in 1998, YouTube is only 14 years old and the iPhone is merely 12. The digital revolution thus far is distinguished by its ability to become ubiquitous in our daily, personal, and commercial lives in an astonishingly rapid time. This statement remains true today, and the pace of technological development means we are constantly on the cusp of emerging issues, often before we've dealt with the implications of the current ones, like the way that neurotechnologies harvest and use brain data, which we need to manage, while we're also dealing with the existing privacy and security issues from frequent and large scale data breaches. The rise of consumer AI provides insight into the remarkable reach and speed we can expect. It took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. The mobile phone took 16 years and the web took seven. Facebook took for you four years. Instagram took three years and ChatGPT took two months. This presentation covers emerging technologies and some sources of friction in decision making and national security agencies, and policymaking in four parts. Part one is about emerging technology and national security broadly. Part two, for the Intel nerds in the House, is friction from within intelligence and decision making. Part three is about friction from outside. So our information environment and part four is hopefully shorter on my part with implications and some questions from you. Today I'm talking about the impact of big data and emerging tech on national security decision making specifically. It's still a really huge area. So I'm going to offer you some wave tops from my research, including my academic master's and PhD and the research of the teams that I've led so far. Data and emerging technologies are creating friction in the process of national security decision making. The big data landscape, which I'll cover next, includes data abundance, digital connectivity, and ubiquitous technology. Given the role in a role of data in emerging technologies, this lens can help expand our aperture a little. Collectively, the big data landscape and technologies like AI are broadening out and challenging our understanding of what constitutes national security. They are also centralising information computation and commercial power. In my research, though, I describe a big data landscape which has three features.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:06:17] They are there present in society broadly, but the reason that I'm representing them like this is that they have a unique and significant implication for the way we think about national security. So when we talk about data abundance, it's a vast and growing volume of data in society. When we talk about digital connectivity, it's about the ability to connect people, places, ideas and things through digital networks. And ubiquitous technology is about the pervasiveness of technology in our lives and the extent to which we interact with it, knowingly or unknowingly. I'm going to dive into each of these and give you a bit of an overview, because it helps us draw together the way that data impacts us personally, um, organisationally and nationally. And more importantly for this session, it helps unpack the implications of technological change for decision making itself. So first up, data abundance. By the beginning of 2020, the number of bytes in the digital universe was 40 times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe. There are three primary locations where our digital content is created the core. So traditional and cloud data centres, the edge enterprise hardened infrastructure like cell towers and offices and then endpoints our computers, mobile phones and IoT devices. The summation of all this data, whether it's captured or created or replicated again and again, is sometimes known as the global data sphere.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:07:43] What's important for national security decision making perspective, though, is that this big data landscape has transformed social action into online quantified data called datafication. From an academic perspective, it has made data collection about human interaction, including aspects that were previously unrecorded, omnipresent. As we move throughout each day, our activity leaves digital footprints with data constantly created by our movements and collected about our activity. This makes it virtually impossible to live without leaving a digital trace. This abundance of data enables inferences about our beliefs, our values, preferences, psychological states, and intimate details, including feelings and vulnerabilities to be deciphered either accurately or inaccurately from data, as well as importantly, the absence of data. These inferences are made about individuals, often without our knowledge, by the aggregation of our seemingly mundane activities. And in short, big data has exploded the scope of personal and personally identifying information. It is possible to build a comprehensive picture about people and things from data alone. Second is digital connectivity, which is the ability to connect people, places, and ideas through our virtual networks. Digital connectivity includes billions of sensors and devices around the world which are connected to the internet. I mean, these estimates of how many devices there are kind of very pretty wildly, but in there is kind of rough consensus that in 2022 it took over the world population. It will overtook the world population.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:09:20] In 2020 machine to machine communications accounted for 40% of the total internet traffic, and this number is obviously going to continue to rise. I'd love to see that stat compared. Now we have GPT, the unprecedented digital connectivity, and exacerbates this data data collection issue. It makes it very difficult for people and objects to move through space without detection, a recognised but nevertheless profound shift for Australians and Australian security. Those objects could be huge, like warships or tiny like our mobile phones. Thirdly, is ubiquitous technology. Ubiquitous technology is the pervasiveness of technology in our lives and the extent to which we interact with it, knowingly or unknowingly. I started with technologies like phones and computers, but there are so many other technologies which are equally as equally as ubiquitous but less visible, such as analytics running over data and sensors in our in our real world environment. The processes and practices of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are largely opaque, but they are nevertheless pervasive. And as Genevieve Bell, the new Anu vice chancellor, set out, it is impossible to understand artificial intelligence as a single piece of technology. It is, in fact, a constellation of technologies. You cannot have artificial intelligence without data. You cannot get to AI without data. But whatever that data is will shape AI profoundly and absolutely from a national security perspective, these three features are really important. Big data means there are now records of movements that were previously unrecorded, and there it's possible to create profiles about people, places, nation states and things from the data.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:11:03] Digital connectivity means the data is collected and analysed in real time, altering some of our intelligence, access and processes. And the ubiquity of technology has diffused vulnerabilities and caused a proliferate proliferation of digital harms. Emerging technologies have centralised information computation and commercial power. You know, in in essence, what I've just said there is that we have a digital infrastructure that is now the backbone of our society. The big data landscape of data abundance, digital connectivity and ubiquitous technology is the foundation for many data driven emerging technologies that we see now from machine learning and artificial intelligence, which require a lot of training data. The more the better. Semiconductor chips being in such demand because of our insatiable appetite for data and the many devices they power. Quantum turbocharging, how we make sense of data, and being able to account for many variables. We collectively, these emerging technologies are also creating momentous shifts in geopolitical power, which we're seeing obviously play out in semiconductors and AI. Now, a handful of companies have monopolised aspects of data abundance, digital connectivity and ubiquitous technology and created what some scholars call an infrastructural core or ecosystem upon which all other applications and platforms are built. This has concentrated information flows, critical data sets and the technical capabilities essential for fundamental functioning democracies and centralise them in the hands of a small number of companies in a quite an unprecedented way.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:12:34] And since virtually all information is now controlled or goes through these these large companies, it changes the security landscape for government, too. It creates unprecedented interconnectivity and vulnerability. A number of scholars have also highlighted that the pandemic has further accelerated this, uh, process and digitalisation in society and contributing to widening power asymmetries between consumers, government and big tech companies. And the list is an excellent example of that. This change is transforming the relationships of and between nation states, national security agencies, companies and populations. We can see examples of this. Uh, you know, the immense power can be seen in the impacts and vulnerabilities of companies like Viasat and Starlink in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I guess what I'm saying here is that emerging technologies have created new national security actors by shifting and concentrating data and analytics and power. We can see this now about data sets and computational capacity. Emerging tech effectively effect or directly impact many of our contemporary security challenges. They are a tool of geopolitical power and statecraft. But before we move on, I just want to touch on the technology ecosystem here. We all know the pace of technology development is unfathomably quick, but adoption and integration of technology is inconsistent across countries, across social demographics, within organisations and across our society. That speed of tech development and adoption is creating a range of tensions between innovation and security, between national and international standards, as well as tech regulation to protect us from social harms.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:14:21] A key point for national security agencies and decision making is that the concentration of capabilities and power have changed. National security agencies relative power technology capabilities are largely, although not exclusively, resident in society and industry and are not controlled or regulated as effectively by government. This is a shift, and many governments, the US included, still seem to be struggling to adapt to that change if they recognise it at all. And those technology and innovation ecosystems include a wide range of players from universities, start ups, innovation hubs, big and small tech players as well as governments and VC investment. And Jen Jackett, who is sitting here, has written a brilliant paper on innovation in defence. If anyone is interested, I want to move then to talking about friction within, um, the decision making process. What I've said there is that big data is affecting national security really broadly. And now when we talk about impact on intelligence and decision making specifically, I'm going to cover intelligence as a frame secrecy, sovereignty and sharing paper, which some of you have in front of you, published that the United States Studies Centre earlier this year and then briefly touch on harms and threat assessment challenges posed by emerging tech. So why the focus on intelligence? It wouldn't be a discussion about intelligence if I didn't have a little bit of Kent and Lowenthal in there.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:15:43] So I had intelligence. Is knowledge vital for national security? Intelligence is in practice can be thought of in three ways as sometimes simultaneously as knowledge and organisation. And according to Kent and Activity or Lowenthal or product. British intelligence luminary David Omand defines the purpose of intelligence as being to help improve the quality of decision making by reducing ignorance, including reducing the vulnerability of that decision maker to uncertainty. And intelligence is one of the primary mechanisms for framing information and analysis to inform national security decision making. It's also a community that I had access to to interview for my PhD, so hence my focus. As I mentioned, I'm going to cover some of the findings from a report published earlier this year. It's called secrecy, Sovereignty and Sharing. And it shows how emerging technologies are challenging some of the fundamental principles and practices of intelligence work. Each of the national intelligence community agencies in Australia have a really specific and legal function and framework, and so the ways that affects them is can be quite different. But this this paper categorises three areas where emerging technologies are challenging some of those principles and practices across the Board of Secrecy, sovereignty or nationality and sharing. The Richardson Review noted that Australia has made several deliberate and principled choices to manage and limit the power and activities of the agencies, and I encourage you to read that full list if you're interested in what those principles and practices, um, choices are.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:17:19] The three that I want to highlight are firstly, secrecy and that is very, very little is likely to remain secret forever in this world. An emerging technology precipitates a shift in the role that secrecy plays in intelligence work. It's obviously vital for protecting intelligence sources and methods, but as so much more is knowable and inferable about the world and community, expectations are changing in relation to transparency from government, particularly as these things occur more into the public space. Government needs to continue to rebalance that the transparency and secrecy requirement. It is important then, to continue to raise policymaker understanding and awareness of the fact that these are current and long standing, deliberate and principled choices relevant to refining that balance. And I know at NSC they have been doing some teaching to the policy makers for this. For this reason, I guess a key impact here is that, um, very little is likely to remain secret forever. And that places a premium on what governments and agencies decide to collect and protect. Secrecy, then, must continuously be rebalanced in a democratic state, and the gap between our community expectations and intelligence capabilities cannot be a gap. That is so far, it cannot be bridged sovereignty or nationality. It was a triple S paper, so it worked better with sovereignty, but nationality is probably slightly more accurate.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:18:45] The academic and the think tank are in me are fighting on this. The telecommunication industry's evolution has complicated user identification, shifting from largely point to point, such as landlines to being data driven across many devices. This directly challenges the legislative requirement of some intelligence agencies to identify geographical jurisdiction and sovereignty of both individuals and their data. How do intelligence agencies compliantly identify Australian people and data within the noise? And some agencies refer to this as collecting compliantly. I mean, my question here for you is what does this mean in a democracy, especially where we have many dual nationals, what does sovereignty mean in intelligence context, and is it changing? The third is data sharing. And obviously digital data sharing is improving in the intelligence agencies, but it still requires more work. Emerging technologies complicate data sharing and specifically sharing with primary decision makers, policy makers and other stakeholders. This is complicated by the fact that now intelligence agencies need to share intelligence more broadly with academia, industry, other government agencies and in some cases, even our population. There's heaps of organisational, analytical and leadership challenges and opportunities for Intel communities, agencies and professionals. And I haven't put anything in that in this presentation. Um, but I know it may be of interest. So happy to answer questions on that. In the last piece about our internal friction, I'd like to highlight harms assessment. This new big data landscape or digital landscape, if you like, has created, as I said, new social harms and more diffuse vulnerabilities that need to be considered by decision makers as national security threats and in a broader decision making framework.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:20:34] As I said, the tech policy environment is interconnected, and so we need to think about these as a broader set of decisions, not sole decision making. And it's actually incredibly complex. It also plays into an extended academic debate about securitisation, and scholars like Zedner, Bouzan, Weaver, Wilde, Wolfers and Oman have extensively debated how much security is enough. Emerging technologies are challenging the existing models of threat assessment and harms assessment, which have been historically focused on physical harm, use of force and economic harm. I highlight what I said earlier about data and analytical capabilities being largely resident outside of government and national security, decision making increasingly occurring outside of government. And so in that way, the big data landscape has changed how intelligence agencies might assess threats. And whether they have the access to the data they need to make assessments, as well as how options for responses are identified. They call into question the notion of proportionate and equivalent responses, especially in relation to use of force and hybrid or grey zone threats. The questions here are things like what is an equivalent or proportionate response to stolen data, disabled communications infrastructure, strategic use of key decision making, brain movement, data or technology usage, or information warfare? And how do we effectively respond to those? We've generally seen friction for democracies and delays in responding to hybrid threats.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:22:05] So things like land reclamation and island building in South China Sea, or invasion of Crimea by known but unmarked troops. Similar issues exist in the information warfare space. And this is this is kind of made increasingly complex because emerging technologies are that complex ecosystem. The depth of tech development and tech regulation make threat assessment and advice really complex and significantly more complicated. They need to happen not in isolation, but they need to be more interconnected. And this necessitates a genuinely whole of government approach to decision making, which is often challenging. So part three are you still everyone still with me? You're not lost anyone in this? The final section about friction and decision making. I want to touch on the ways that emerging technologies have radically changed our information environment. These changes are essentially creating friction in policy and national security making. But this time, from the outside in the decision making process, they are resulting in populations and new actors playing a much bigger role and and often complicating national security decision making. So the most important areas for this audience, I think, are the impact of emerging technologies on information environment. Uh, a quick cover of situational awareness and tracking, targeting and surveillance. And then we'll move to the implications. The military used the Terme information environment to describe how people get information. How they understand their world and the infrastructure it relies on.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:23:40] So that's three things. Content infrastructure and cognitive resilience. It's a great way to look at some of the challenges, but it also helps us find solutions. The information environment encompasses everything from human influence right the way through to information warfare, from peacetime to acute large scale conflict. And as a result, it's discussed not just by global leaders, you know, and defence chiefs, but by citizens in Sydney, in Kiev, by people currently experiencing disinformation and misinformation on their social media platforms. The interdependence of our global systems means the speed, reach, volume, and precision of decision making generated by foreign adversaries can target our decisions our policy, national security decisions, our individual and national reputation, and can impact social cohesion. All the data are. Abundance I covered earlier can be used to micro-target individuals and groups for malign influence and interference. Micro-targeting and I are using data to target small groups or even individuals by data, views, likes and desires. I mean, obviously the desire to target people on an individual scale is not new, but the technical capabilities underpinning this are being driven by this new digital landscape and particularly now with AI. They're enabling contemporary information warfare as well as political influence and interference. In my earlier works, I looked at how technology has enabled automation and amplification of these messages. But we can see now with AI, the scope and frequency of those threats has increased significantly. What's really important, though, is it has the capacity to shape an individual's information environment, including what they see, their options, the choices they're presented with, what they think, how others, what they think others believe, and then ultimately, how they might view the world.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:25:33] In a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy recently, I outlined the impact of the changes that at X or Twitter that have been taken over since Musk took over, and what changes to the platform have how those changes have systematically amplified state propaganda? I'm not really using X anymore. So I think aside from occasional things, for this reason, I think the fragmented media landscape and micro-targeting lead to an increase in political and social polarisation, which can absolutely and is being exploited by adversaries. This includes mass influence and interference, such as the ability to specifically to target specific groups and influence individuals, the ability to identify and exploit our own psychological weaknesses, and the ability to interfere in political and civil processes like elections. You know, as I look at some of the technologies coming down the line, we see things like AI and Neurotech significantly increasing those capabilities for influence. We've obviously seen how granular targeting, even pre AI, is well established in the electoral and commercial realms and has laid the groundwork for the kind of election influence and interference seen in the political and civil context. And there's loads of election examples. We can also see how AI is being applied to enable disinformation and influence and interference.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:26:55] At the Australian Cyber Security Conference in 2017, I presented and said that we were just starting to see the use of the information to influence people, decisions and outcomes, and I think we now have the infrastructure to turbocharge this. The trajectory from my position looks immense, and the use of data analytics and this broader information environment to attack individuals, our decisions and outcomes is deeply disturbing. We see evidence that certain groups and specifically women, LGBTQi and indigenous people are subjected to more online attacks. We've also seen how people have been personally attacked for organisational and military decisions, including command decisions. You know, when deployed, there are really limited options available at the moment for organisations to protect those decision makers from these kind of attacks. You're going to do a hard pivot here and briefly cover situational awareness and tracking, targeting and surveillance before giving you some implications. The landscape that I outlined at the beginning can obviously dramatically improve situational awareness, and it can be used to target adversaries when well integrated into command and control. And that's a pretty big caveat. Information dominance produces military dominance, and big data offers global situational awareness on a scale not previously possible. I've analysed and processed well. It can outpace adversary decision making processes. Remote sensors on a large scale can provide information for situational awareness and confer a strategic advantage. Big data landscape can be connected, components of it can be connected to space based systems, targeting systems, and used to help gain control of territory and territorial approaches.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:28:47] It can also create uncertainty about the safety of transit in disputed territories, or perhaps even previously benign ones. Big data and remote sensors can also be used in war to improve targeting for kinetic action. An example of how the framework has been set up for this can be seen in the South China Sea, where China has deployed a number of remote sensors and communications capabilities between Hainan Island and the Paracel Islands. The ability to triangulate exact locations based on an array of cheap and easy to access sensors, especially when they're much cheaper than the traditional ISR assets, obviously has significant implications for vessel transit. Remote sensors and big data analytics are being combined with traditional ISR platforms using AI applications. And example, of course, is the Chinese People's Liberation Army approach to what they termed intelligent warfare. And there's plenty of civil military fusion options. The military utility of sensing and communications functions, and the enhanced potential it offers for real time situational awareness, as well as increased capacity to target adversaries in conflict, is clearly a critical concern. In conjunction with your traditional military assets. This provides adversaries with the infrastructure to ensure unparalleled situational awareness on a global scale and control large areas of international waters. Separately, the big data landscape enables tracking, targeting and surveillance of humans, human beings, and often in real time. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:30:20] It enables invasive identification of and sometimes complete access to our physical and online activity. Locations and movement. The degree of data abundance and connectivity means comprehensive profiles can be created. You know about us as individuals, but interest groups, political groups, and even nation state activities remotely and quickly. You know, I often talk about this as there is also the capacity to understand now because there is so much data in existence. What a great area where we're not online or we're not contributing data to that data sphere might like. And I think if we aren't there already, in the not too distant future, no one will be able to escape digital surveillance. From an individual perspective, we talk about this a lot about our own personal privacy intrusion, but from a national security perspective, this landscape offers the potential for invasive targeting and surveillance of individuals by new actors. And I've got a lot of examples, but I will skip them in the interest of time, the national security implications of complete or near-complete data, coverage of human lives, and who has access to that, and what can be done with aggregate data are only now beginning to be appreciated in public commentary. In short, the big data landscape democratises the capabilities underpinning targeting and surveillance, which are functions previously reserved for nation states and our governments, where once those states exercised surveillance with external authorisation and oversight. Uh, you know, these big data systems enable that tracking, monitoring, analysis and make the capabilities available to a much broader, uh, set of actors in opaque environments with varying and mostly nonexistent regulation of their activities.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:32:07] I'm going to end on some implications that I'm sure there will be some questions. Thanks for bearing with me as we balance those different sides of how there are frictions in decision making processes from both inside and outside. I think in the face of this, we need to study our institutions and processes. They obviously challenge our internal processes and impact the environments in which our decisions are made. I've presented mostly here emerging tech as a source of friction, but there's also heaps of opportunities to improve and augment decisions and decision making processes. And I am looking to do more work in this space. I had some thoughts on really specific implications for intelligence and information environment. So I kind of bounced through these. We really need to see more of a need. For increased oversight into resources and capability, and it's a pleasure to see Juliet put into the role of the Independent National Security Legislation monitor from Anu. I think intelligence agencies and national security agencies more broadly need to get much, much better at engaging with experts and innovators to answer questions, solve problems and provide a more comprehensive national security advice that probably goes more broadly to defence and government. Collaborating is easier said than done, and I guess we need to increase engagement with Australians about national security expectations and what they want their intelligence communities to look like, and create forums to enable that communication.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:33:29] I haven't covered it here, but a lot of my work has also been on building trust, transparency and legitimacy in intelligence agencies and government, and empowering leaders to provide environments that enable innovation for intelligence. Finally, on the information environment, I really hope that the susceptibility of our digital landscape to disinformation, interference and exploitation increases in significance on our agenda, in particular to strengthen resilience. The ongoing impact of blurring of war and peace on policy and on our populations is critical. And in relation to information, influence and interference is a really important factor. We need to consider cognitive resilience, particularly as our region becomes more malign. We need some forms to bring together stakeholders. I'm really heartened by the work that is being done across a range of government agencies, and we mentioned this earlier, how broad the tech policy landscape is and how much work is going on globally in relation to regulation. But in Australia, agencies working in the protection of infrastructure, digital platform competition, reducing online harms and cybersecurity, there is a lot going on in this space and I want to recognise that there are also a myriad of efforts by some parts of industry to improve areas, from content authenticity initiatives to ideas of innovate fast but implement slowly and with purpose.

Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:34:52] There's also significant global collaboration on things like online harm regulation, the Christchurch Call on standard setting. So I want to leave you with the thought here that technology ecosystem is a global one. It is diverse across many industries. All our industries are digital now. It's diverse across countries in sophistication, and that makes it really exciting and innovative, but also sometimes challenging for government to engage with. The technology is a complex ecosystem where seemingly small shifts in one thing, like a digital platform such as Twitter, can have huge impacts elsewhere, like in elections. It also means we need to think in systems. We need to think and work collaboratively to build solutions. As leaders in decision makers, we in this room are in fact a dwindling crowd. We all put our hands up to the wall. Most of us put our hands up to remembering Pre-cloud life, and we will eventually be replaced by a generation of digital natives. And I think it's a great opportunity for those who can remember both worlds to help shape a future that we want our kids to live in. Thanks for listening to technology and security. I've been your host, Dr Miah Hammond-Errey. See if there was a moment you enjoyed today or a question you have about the show. Feel free to tweet me at Miah_HE. We hope you enjoy this episode and we'll see you soon.