Cloak & daggerGoodbye James Bond, hello big data
Just as the technological revolution has transformed how people live and do business, it has upended the often hidebound field of intelligence gathering. Where once the focus might have been on the savvy agent clandestinely dashing around the world, like James Bond, now it’s on something far less sexy but no less vital: big data. “That [Bond] model, if it was ever true, is completely over,” said Sir John Sawers, chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known to fans of spy novels as MI6, from 2009 to 2014. “Now, the most important person in any intelligence service is the data analyst, because it’s the data analyst who will tell you where the threats are coming from and where the opportunities are emerging that you as an intelligence agency can exploit.”
Just as the technological revolution has transformed how people live and do business, it has upended the often hidebound field of intelligence gathering. Where once the focus might have been on the savvy agent clandestinely dashing around the world, like James Bond, now it’s on something far less sexy but no less vital: big data.
“That [Bond] model, if it was ever true, is completely over,” said Sir John Sawers, chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known to fans of spy novels as MI6, from 2009 to 2014. “Now, the most important person in any intelligence service is the data analyst, because it’s the data analyst who will tell you where the threats are coming from and where the opportunities are emerging that you as an intelligence agency can exploit.”
Following a distinguished career in diplomacy (he also was British ambassador to the United Nations and Egypt), Sawers is at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) this week speaking about national security, intelligence, diplomacy, and public service as a Fisher Family Fellow. During a talk Monday, he encouraged listeners thinking of pursuing a career in government to look beyond the typically modest pay such work affords compared with careers in business or the law.
“One thing which I never had any difficulty with in 36 years of working for government was getting out of bed in the morning, because I always knew that what I was going to be doing was interesting, fulfilling, rewarding, and had value,” he said, sitting alongside HKS faculty members Nicholas Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, and Ashton Carter, former defense secretary in the Obama administration and now director of the Belfer Center.
Among the greatest security challenges of this century is the shifting global power balance. Britain and the U.S. are no longer the pre-eminent world powers they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Like it or not, China is ascendant, and figuring out how power will be shared between China and the U.S., the speakers indicated, is a critical “known unknown.”
