00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Wigman, congrats again on your nomination.
00:07We talked a little bit about technology issues, and it's clear to me that advancements in
00:14tech drive our national security, including our intelligence capabilities. From the rapid
00:21advancement of A.I. and facial recognition and space-based systems, these technologies
00:29and the countries who excel at deploying them determine the security landscape that we're
00:36going to live in. And they're changing very quickly. Sometimes, in a matter of weeks or
00:42months today, we see dramatic changes in technology.
00:47And I think a challenge that we face here in Congress is grappling with the ability
00:53to legislate effectively on a topic that requires a lot of technical expertise. And sometimes
01:02this stuff is hard to understand. And I imagine that's similar in the legal profession.
01:07So can you share with us a little bit about how you overcome that kind of challenge when
01:13presented with some novel legal questions on emerging or evolving technologies?
01:19Yeah, so it can be challenging for lawyers. I mean, certainly you're an engineer, an astronaut.
01:24It's probably a lot easier for you to assess these issues than lawyers who sometimes really
01:28are wrestling with technologies that they don't understand. And so artificial intelligence
01:32is a good example of that, at least to me. It's a new technology. Understanding how a
01:37large language model works and what the implications are for privacy and national security is difficult.
01:45There are going to be questions, for example, that we're wrestling with right now under
01:49the Attorney General guidelines that govern intelligence activities and how they would
01:53apply to the intelligence community's use of large language models and artificial intelligence.
01:59So generally speaking, in other words, the goal in the intelligence community is to try
02:03to minimize your collection of U.S. person information and get as little information
02:07as possible consistent with your mission. A large language model is the opposite premise.
02:12You need to have as much information as possible to make that model effective and to have the
02:18answers that it produces be the correct ones. And so how are we going to reconcile those
02:24kind of opposing impulses? And the way the guidelines are written right now, they don't
02:29take into account, they weren't written with artificial intelligence in mind. So we're
02:32going to have to wrestle with that and maybe come up with different guidelines as to how
02:36that works. So we see in the executive branch, similar to what the Congress would be facing,
02:41because we have our own rules and regulations that we set for the intelligence community
02:45as an executive branch matter and face many of the same challenges that this committee
02:49or others in Congress would confront.
02:51So it sounds like you have a little bit of experience in the AI field that you can use
02:58here in your new role. But what other policies and legal issues that you worked on at DOJ
03:05do you anticipate is going to be a continued focus in your job in the intelligence community?
03:13Well, I mentioned the 702 reauthorization, so that's one that we clearly will be working
03:18on closely with DOJ. Another big issue that I partnered closely with ODNI on, I don't
03:22know how familiar the committee is with it, is the fallout from the European Court of
03:27Justice's Shrems decision from a few years back. This was a decision that basically held
03:32that companies operating in Europe could not transfer data to the United States because
03:38of concern that our surveillance laws, whether those be FISA or under 12333, did not adequately
03:44protect European citizens' privacy. So we had to go back to the drawing board in terms
03:48of our laws, come up with a new executive order, which President Biden ended up issuing
03:5414086 to provide new privacy protections, even included a new data privacy court that
04:01we established at DOJ to hear claims of European nationals who believe they're being unlawfully
04:06surveilled. So there's kind of a creative solution. It's going to be an ongoing issue
04:09though because I'm sure it's being challenged already in the European courts again, and
04:13we're going to have another round of litigation. And so that's an issue that I think ODNI is
04:17going to have to continue to work on.
04:18With the exception of that example and maybe FISA, do you have an example of maybe what
04:25you think another really challenging legal issue that the intelligence community is going
04:31to face here going forward?
04:33I think if I could flag counter-narcotics, I know that's an area of deep concern to the
04:40Congress is the fentanyl and all the deaths that are resulting from fentanyl and other
04:44synthetic opiates in the United States. And I think it's an area that the IC has always
04:47worked in the counter-narcotics space, but we're going to be doing more in that space
04:51and how to kind of merge and have law enforcement and the IC work together on the counter-narcotics
04:57threat in maybe ways that are similar to how we've dealt with the counter-terrorism threat
05:01looks good on paper, but it's going to be a challenge in practice to kind of translate
05:06some of those lessons that learned in the terrorism context over the counter-narcotics
05:09context. So I think that's one that's going to be an ongoing project for a number of years.
05:14Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
05:17Does any member wish to ask?
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