The CIA’s SXSW Sales Pitch: We Need Your Help, Please Come Work for Us
A three-letter agency came to a four-letter conference that hasn’t always welcomed intelligence organizations with an unlikely request: Join us.
“We're looking to engage with all of you,” said David Cohen, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in a panel discussion(Opens in a new window) at 2023 South by Southwest (SXSW) on Monday afternoon. “We need to work even more with all of you to get our job done.”
That hour-long discussion between Cohen and his fellow speakers–Jennifer Ewbank, deputy director for digital innovation; Sheetal Patel, assistant director of the agency’s Transnational and Technology Mission Center; and Nand Mulchandani, chief technology officer–served both as an introduction to the agency’s work and as a recruiting sales pitch.
The four of them suggested a common interest between CIA operatives overseas and privacy-minded SXSW attendees here: the potential harm from increasingly pervasive digital sensing and tracking.
“When we work with a source, an asset overseas, we have a solemn obligation to protect that source,” Cohen said. Adding that “ubiquitous surveillance” endangers those sources, he said he supposed that many audience members also wanted to use technology to disrupt that tracking: “If you have any good ideas, we'd be happy to hear about them afterwards.”
Ewbank then took the audience back to Cold War tradecraft by CIA agents in the USSR. “Everything you did was observed, recorded, held and kept and analyzed,” she said. “And yet we still had to meet spies on the streets of the Soviet Union.”
That challenge forced the agency to create its own technological countermeasures: “We created the world's first secure text messaging system,” called Discus(Opens in a new window).
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