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Venkat, long time (since BrSmrt Season 1!) reader, first time caller. I offer you the rare “no, and” here — at the strategic level. Most people misunderstand what most 3-letter agencies do. Cybersecurity especially. I used to coordinate it all (fr), happy to explain further.
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Cybersecurity and info ops work are a pretty big spectrum of things. On IO the platforms run investigative teams. But I would imagine that isn’t falling into those R&D budgets…that seems more likely to be the metaverse research type activity
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Yes, but the point is, that kind of pure R&D is what ends up building capabilities that leave them the only actors with the ability to do the security stuff... like say develop machine learning for business use, apply it to malicious action detection
This is a long discussion and I wouldn’t want to presume I understand the totality of what Renee told you, which we may not disagree on. I would just offer that the remit of those agencies doesn’t overlap with broadly understood, broadly executed “decensive cyber operations”
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Perhaps "defensive cyber ops" is the wrong term, perhaps it is more DHS and CBP type function rather than FBI/CIA. Broad point is: some migration of state security functions to private actors due to their being only ones with resources, incentives, and expertise to actually do it
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