NATSEC-TECH THURSDAY — March 27, 2025: Every Thursday’s edition of Threat Status highlights the intersection between national security and advanced technology, from AI to cyber threats and the battle for global data dominance.
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The imbroglio over senior Trump administration officials’ use of the encrypted messaging app Signal has offered a glimpse into how CIA officers have adopted the platform and how America’s enemies are trying to hack it.
… Various news outlets are now digging through administration officials’ public profiles on other commercially available platforms. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who apparently accidentally added Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat about a U.S. attack on Yemen’s Houthis, is reported to have failed to set his Venmo payments app profile to private.
… The U.S. has given initial approval for Qatar to buy $2 billion worth of General Atomics-manufactured MQ-9B Predator drones.
… The U.S. Navy and the Missile Defense Agency successfully executed “Flight Test Other-40 (FTX-40), or Stellar Banshee,” on Monday, demonstrating what officials say is a key step in anti-hypersonic defense tactics.
… L3 Harris’ President of Space and Airborne Systems Ed Zoiss tells Threat Status in an exclusive video interview that a hypersonic ballistic tracking space sensor (HBTSS) satellite layer will be critical to the “Golden Dome” missile defense system called for by President Trump.
… The Senate and House Homeland Security chairs say the Transportation Security Administration “may have engaged in unwarranted” screenings based on “political beliefs” and “travel patterns” under the Biden administration.
… And the Commerce Department has added 80 entities from China, Iran, South Africa, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates to its Entity List designed to “cut off foreign adversaries seeking to exploit American technology for malign purposes.”
Amid intense scrutiny over the disclosure of a private Signal conversation featuring top administration officials to a journalist, CIA Director John Ratcliffe this week revealed the extent to which American spies have adopted Signal, saying the administration had approved use of the platform for communication and coordination — so long as any decisions were then recorded through formal channels.
“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA,” Mr. Ratcliffe told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “As it is for most CIA officers.”
Russian-linked hackers are suspected of trying to compromise Signal’s tool for linking multiple devices to a single account, and China’s Typhoon hackers are focused on penetrating the American telecom sector to get inside victims’ phones.
Revelations about Moscow’s efforts emerged in February, when Google said it “observed increasing efforts from several Russia state-aligned threat actors to compromise Signal Messenger accounts used by individuals of interest to Russia’s intelligence services.”
The Russian attackers sought access to victims’ accounts via Signal’s “linked devices” feature that enables people to use the platform on multiple devices at the same time. Google said it worked with Signal to investigate the Russian cyber activity and that the latest updates in Apple and Google’s app stores contained features designed to guard against such attacks in the future.
The Army plans to field its first “human-machine integrated formation platoons” by 2027, a transformational shift that the Pentagon says will allow robots to make first contact with the enemy on the battlefield.
It’s a key point of discussion at the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Symposium & Exposition this week in Huntsville, Alabama, one of the nation’s epicenters for cutting-edge research, development and fielding of capabilities in the space, military and other domains critical to U.S. national security.
National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang is at the AUSA symposium, where military officials say human-machine integrated formations, or HMIF, are a central part of the “no blood through first contact” war-fighting principle that aims to leverage artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, advanced robotics and other technological advantages to protect soldiers.
“Military operations worldwide are becoming increasingly dominated by the integration of humans and machines on the battlefield,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Judy, a military deputy for HMIF in the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, told an audience at AUSA. “HMIF will bring robot systems into formations with the goal of having machines, not soldiers, make first contact with the enemy.”
Jim Mitre, director of Global and Emerging Risks for the California-based research organization, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that the development of artificial general intelligence could result in “the sudden emergence of a decisive wonder weapon” in cyberspace — “a capability so proficient at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in enemy cyberdefenses that it provides what might be called a splendid first cyber strike that completely disables a retaliatory cyber strike.”
Mr. Mitre said the emergence of AGI may alter the global balance of power, with states that control and capitalize on the consequences of AGI gaining expanded influence. “Consider an AGI with advanced computer programming abilities that is able to ‘break out of the box’ and engage with the world across cyberspace,” he said. “It could possess agency beyond human control, operate autonomously, and make decisions with far-reaching consequences. Such an AGI could be misaligned — that is, operate in ways that are inconsistent with the intentions of its human designers or operators.”
Carried to the extreme, the AGI could resist being turned off in a nightmare scenario. The Rand Corp. is far from the only one worried about rogue AI. San Francisco-based OpenAI started assembling a team in 2023 focused on preventing AI from going rogue and leading to human extinction. One of the team’s leaders, Ilya Sutskever, later left the company to form a new project called Safe Superintelligence Inc.
The CIA director says he’s focused on stealing China’s secrets after identifying gaps in America’s efforts to collect intelligence inside the communist country. Mr. Ratcliffe outlined his aggressive plans for the CIA in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday, urging a change in approach to China.
“I think our collection against China is a hard target. In the prior administration, it was lacking in several areas,” Mr. Ratcliffe testified. “I would say primarily in human collection and also with regard to the processing of open source information relating to China.”
At least 18 CIA sources were killed or imprisoned in China between 2010 and 2012, according to a 2017 New York Times report. Debate about the cause of the disaster has ensued with blame heaped upon a suspected CIA turncoat and the potential compromise of the agency’s covert communications system.
An all-of-industry approach to building a layered, integrated air- and missile-defense shield is “eminently possible by 2030,” writes Phil Jasper, the president of Raytheon, an RTX business.
“Defense experts agree that aerial threats to the homeland are growing. In response, Mr. Trump has boldly proposed investing in a Golden Dome to protect our nation in an increasingly hostile world,” writes Mr. Jasper, who asserts that “the resulting system will be flexible, deployable and capable of defending against ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, advanced airborne threats and drones.”
“Systems like the ones used to protect Israel from Iran and Ukraine from Russia are tested and battle-proven,” he writes, adding that a “combination of the most advanced radar and interceptor systems supplemented by ship-based and aircraft defenses could lay the foundation of the Golden Dome for America today to meet the president’s phase 1 goal of 2026.”
• April 10-11 — Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Vanderbilt University
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