Intelligence Community Directive 406 was signed in the dying days of the Biden Administration – on January 16 – essentially, yet another part in a recent big drive, pushed particularly strongly during the recent WEF meetings in Davos, to promote “public-private” partnerships.
The directive, as Ken Klippenstein reports signed by the then director of national intelligence, was focused on encouraging US intelligence agencies to “partner” with those privately owned corporations that already have troves of data at their disposal – such as, for example, tech corporations behind social platforms, but also those developing AI.
A new administration has taken over in the US, and as of this time, it remains unclear how or if it intends to implement and use these newly introduced powers.
The order’s key provisions are to facilitate how spy agencies can use both data and expertise that corporations have. The misgivings about this particular policy view have to do with how vast both these categories have become, and how they have fueled financial success of tech companies, and therefore their role.
It could also be read as one last ditch effort to compromise the credibility of Big Tech, and put a question mark over some new trends, involving a number of these corporations openly turning against their “tormentors” of many years, and embracing the new administration.
And, if the order were to be carried out by that new administration, it would see intelligence agencies going “all in” to create – or deepen – their work with the said companies, including by employing “risk acceptance” as a part of prioritizing National Security Entity (NSE) engagements.
This comes down to the US intelligence apparatus supposedly relaxing its own security restrictions in order to advance such “partnerships.”
The document details how this should happen, one thing being “expanding the use of one-time read-ins” which would do away with previously established security clearance protocols when the need is identified for private individuals to be “briefed” by US spy agencies.
Observers note that the directive is murky in terms of what specific kind of “engagement and cooperation” it seeks to promote, but, Ken Klippenstein writes, “their target clearly includes the appistocracy who attended President Trump’s inauguration last week.”
Klippenstein’s take is that the government needs Big Tech more than is the case the other way around. The Trump administration’s moves, specifically around how the directive is carried out, will shed light on that point.
