Thursday Keynote

Thursday's keynote was given by Dr. Eric Haseltine, a neuroscientist, futurist and former 

CTO for national intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as the former director of research at the National Security Agency. His talk focused on biomimicry and deception, comparing certain EW and cyber tactics to examples of deception found in nature.

Hazeltine introduced his talk by discussing cognitive biases in humans. He said, "…we tend to see what we expect to see and we don't see what we don't expect to see. We tend to see what we want to see and not what we don't want to see." He explained, "… if we want to see what the adversary is doing with denial and deception, we should not be looking out. We should be looking in, because we have blind spots. And the evil thing about those blind spots is that our brain blinds them to us."

Russians, he said, understand their adversary's blind spots very well, whereas the west tends not be less aware of them. He said, "…when you really think about cyber and you think about EW, one thing we often do not think about is that there's a human being connected to that piece of equipment. And where is the greatest vulnerability always, whether it's cyber or EW? It's the operator. And we lose sight of that because the technology is so sexy."

Haseltine noted Sun Tzu's principle that "all war is deception." He then began describing the role of deception in evolution. "In the past, let's say in the past 3 billion years, which is about when we think evolution started, we have this process of constant adaptation and change, which continues through to today. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't take a close look at what nature has already done." He explained to that audience that there are some lessons to be learned by "diving deep into what biology does, because for sure, there are some new answers in there for your future." He then provided examples from biology that show concepts such as "hide, confuse obscure law, discourage, disgust, exhaust, frustrate, lure, scare and sneer and hurt," as well as "compete." 

Using an example of each concept, he explained how the concept can be matched to specific EW and cyber tactics. For example, certain moth species can exhaust their prey (bats, in this case) by moving slower but turning faster and tighter and making the bat miss its target, until the prey gives up the chase. The cyber equivalent, said Haseltine, is creating an overwhelming amount of useless data that forces an adversary to use lots of resources to comb through it all. In EW, the equivalent is creating lots of meaningless transmissions to overwhelm an adversary's signal collection and processing resources.

Haseltine said all of these tactics pose a specific challenge. "So, what's the key challenge? You're doing all this deception. How do you avoid deceiving yourself? Well, first of all, I'm not going to B.S. you and say you're going to have a 100% perfect way of doing this. You are going to have some problems." He said that lawyers in any organization will try to minimize legal risk and argue against intentional acts of deception, such as putting false data in government files and information. "The culture is going to fight you," he said. "But that's an interesting thing. If the culture isn't fighting you, you're probably not doing something new and revolutionary. And again, I come back to cognitive biases. The adversary knows we're bureaucratic. They know we don't do certain things…. And, so they're not going to expect us to do certain things."

Toward the end of his speech, Haseltine talked about a part of the human immune system that has the ability to generate antibodies to infections the body has not seen before. "This is the most important lesson nature has. You don't change when it's obvious you have to change. Then you become a fossil – it's too late. You change before you have to change…. What would this mean in the cyber world or what would this mean in the EW world? It would mean coming up with counters to attacks we haven't seen yet, so that when you see something like it, you can quickly adapt and go after it. Billions of years of evolution say this is the way to not become a fossil."