Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence by Amy B Zegart

This was a really great book that helped me understand quite a bit more about the problems faced by the US government intelligence community. The book does a deep dive into the history of the IC and discusses some of the successes and failures that the IC has had throughout history.

Backed by nearly 30 years of research, it is clear that Zegart is a leading expert on the IC as a non-governmental employee. Her credentials include advising Washington, books written, public service positions, and educating undergraduate students at Stanford and UCLA. This is an impressively well informed book that does a great job of dissecting some of publicly available information from the most secretive organizations in the United States.

I was particularly impressed with the sections covering the failures around the decision to invade Iraq and the chain of events that led to bad intelligence gathering and information distribution leading up to that event. Zegart does an exceptional job explaining the common pitfalls of intelligence operations and how they have played out in numerous different historical examples. This is a great history of the IC.

Despite being 1/3rd of the title, cyber only takes up one chapter of the book. Ontop of the education we got a Berkeley and my own research and reading, I didn’t find anything particularly new or interesting in this chapter. Despite Zegart being a Stanford professor, there was a great shoutout to the work done by our very own Prof. Hany Farid on deepfakes though! I would have loved to see more on cyber security – but none the less I found this book to be very enjoyable and on par with some other works I’ve enjoyed by Thomas Rid.

Also the audiobook was read by Zegart herself!

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence by Amy B Zegart

This was a really great book that helped me understand quite a bit more about the problems faced by the US government intelligence community. The book does a deep dive into the history of the IC and discusses some of the successes and failures that the IC has had throughout history.

Backed by nearly 30 years of research, it is clear that Zegart is a leading expert on the IC as a non-governmental employee. Her credentials include advising Washington, books written, public service positions, and educating undergraduate students at Stanford and UCLA. This is an impressively well informed book that does a great job of dissecting some of publicly available information from the most secretive organizations in the United States.

I was particularly impressed with the sections covering the failures around the decision to invade Iraq and the chain of events that led to bad intelligence gathering and information distribution leading up to that event. Zegart does an exceptional job explaining the common pitfalls of intelligence operations and how they have played out in numerous different historical examples. This is a great history of the IC.

Despite being 1/3rd of the title, cyber only takes up one chapter of the book. Ontop of the education we got a Berkeley and my own research and reading, I didn’t find anything particularly new or interesting in this chapter. Despite Zegart being a Stanford professor, there was a great shoutout to the work done by our very own Prof. Hany Farid on deepfakes though! I would have loved to see more on cyber security – but none the less I found this book to be very enjoyable and on par with some other works I’ve enjoyed by Thomas Rid.

Also the audiobook was read by Zegart herself!