A special team created by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has expressed a desire to gain access to emails and chat logs of the largest U.S.spy agencies with the aim of using AI tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The mission of the Director’s Initiative Group, or DIG, is to enforce President Donald Trump’s executive orders to end “weaponization” of the federal government, declassify documents and halt diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to Gabbard’s office.
So far, none of the U.S.spy agencies approached has transferred the data, several people said.
The unprecedented interest in data by officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence startled some senior agency officials, who have expressed concerns about the counterintelligence and privacy risks of aggregating what could be a large amount of sensitive information that may include references to intercepts of electronic communications on overseas targets, said several U.S.officials and others familiar with aspects of the effort.Like most people interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
“They wanted access to everybody’s systems,” one of the people said, adding that the idea just seemed “naive.”
Some senior intelligence officials are also privately concerned that the effort could be used to pursue perceived disloyalty to the Trump administration, including to identify individuals who implemented the policies of the previous administration.
Gabbard’s press secretary, Olivia Coleman, disputed The Post’s reporting.“The truth is, under the leadership of President Trump, DNI Gabbard and her team at ODNI are daring to do what no other has done before — expose the truth and end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans.”
Officials at the agencies have asked the DIG officials to provide reasons it would need the data, according to several people familiar with the effort.
Asked what types of data the DIG was interested in, Coleman said, “ODNI coordinates with agencies across the [intelligence community] to organize information that is responsive and meets requirements of all presidential [executive orders] and memorandums.”
It has obtained the unclassified email archive of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a technology development arm of the intelligence community.The DIG team intends to do a test run of AI tools on that data, according to one person.
Gabbard has “directed a review of IARPA” in line with the president’s goal of reducing waste and cutting costs, Coleman said.
The data access effort, which has not previously been disclosed, has fueled anxiety among some career intelligence professionals that Gabbard may be allowing politics to taint what is meant to be the apolitical job of gathering and analyzing intelligence for national security policymakers and the president.
Rep.
Jim Himes (Connecticut), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he has “limited visibility” into the DIG’s activities.“But what I have seen gives me real cause for concern,” he said.“In their zeal to root out ‘politicization,’ which often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president, there is a danger of creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks,” Himes said.
The committee chairman, Rep.Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas), has praised Gabbard “for her efforts to create accountability in the intelligence community.” In a statement in May, he said that “correcting the direction of a large ship will never be easy.It’s bound to be laden with obstructions and those looking to undermine change.” Gabbard “has done the right thing,” Crawford said, in seeking to root out politicization in intelligence work.
Gabbard, long a skeptic of the U.S.intelligence community, has repeatedly pledged to end what she and Trump deem the use of powerful U.S.
spy agencies for political purposes.But in her five months as intelligence czar overseeing 18 intelligence agencies, she has fired or reassigned top intelligence analysts, mischaracterized declassified intelligence reports to make political points and called for leak probes of news stories that ran counter to Trump’s agenda.
The precise size and staffing of the DIG, whose creation Gabbard announced in April, is not publicly known.
Its ranks include personnel detailed from other agencies and “special government employees” — outsiders brought into the government temporarily to do specific tasks — said one of the people familiar with it.All of the team members have “proper clearances,” Coleman said.
In announcing its creation, Gabbard’s office said the DIG would focus on potential declassification of intelligence documents on matters including the origins of covid-19; mysterious medical ailments known as “anomalous health incidents” that include the “Havana syndrome”; and the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe of ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, which Trump has dismissed as a “hoax.”
Though some of the emails and other communications the DIG has expressed an interest in may not be classified, they reside on classified systems, including the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, or JWICS, which gives verified users access to top-secret information.Analysts also communicate with one another across agencies on top-secret internal messaging systems, conferring on highly sensitive subjects ranging from nuclear facilities in Iran and North Korea to Chinese intentions on Taiwan.These communications may reference raw signals intelligence — highly sensitive information gleaned from wiretaps and text messages or other electronic communications.
“That’d be a treasure trove of a target for any foreign intelligence service to go after,” said one person familiar with the matter.
Gabbard was a vocal privacy hawk as a congresswoman from Hawaii, opposing major electronic surveillance programs that she argued violated civil liberties.She also once supported a pardon for former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked troves of classified data to journalists.
“She’d be creating a giant database that includes info on U.S.
persons, that she herself fought against for decades,” said another person familiar with the matter.
While acknowledging that aggregating such data in one place may make for a tempting target, the intelligence community’s storage solutions — including in the cloud — have proved secure, said a former senior intelligence official with experience in AI and data security.
In remarks at an Amazon Web Services summit last month, Gabbard noted that she created the DIG as a “team of special teams” focusing on “innovation within the intelligence community” and using AI tools to more efficiently declassify documents in the public interest.The ODNI has recently released tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of President John F.Kennedy and Sen.Robert F.
Kennedy, she noted.
The DIG’s work is overseen by senior national intelligence officer Paul McNamara, a retired U.S.Army lieutenant colonel who supported Gabbard’s nomination to be DNI.Though Gabbard only officially set up the group in April, members of McNamara’s ODNI team had spoken to intelligence officials months earlier of their intent to seek access to the data, according to several people.
They included an employee sent from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Alan McDonald, who Coleman said assisted in obtaining records related to the president’s executive order on declassifying JFK and RFK files, Coleman said.He has since left the ODNI, she said.
The DIG set its sights on several of the largest and most important intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, according to several people.
ODNI personnel spoke to senior officials at these agencies in late February, saying that they wanted to investigate the use of an internal chatroom by employees who engaged in sexually explicit conversations, revelations of which stirred controversy.More than 100 employees across multiple intelligence agencies were fired in the wake of the scandal, Gabbard said.
But DIG members also expressed an interest in gaining access to chat logs and email archives at the agencies, an effort that probably would encounter legal and other roadblocks if they persist, the people said.
DIG officials asked for access at the level of a network “system administrator,” which would have meant unencumbered ability to retrieve the data, one person said.
DIG representatives have framed their requests as a desire to achieve efficiencies, similar to what the U.S.Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was seeking at other agencies across the federal government.
But, said another person, “the underlying tone and tenor was also to find the ‘Deep State,’” or individuals and bureaucrats seen as having agendas that conflict with Trump’s.
ODNI has engaged a Wyoming-incorporated company, Mojave Research Inc., to deploy AI tools on the data.
“The use of modern analytical capability is essential in improving the mission responsiveness, effectiveness and efficiency” in the intelligence agencies, Coleman said.“Mojave Research conducts analysis and provides technical solutions in support of ODNI’s goal of creating an efficient intelligence community.”
The former senior intelligence official cautioned that one of the issues with AI tools, whether used in the classified or commercial setting, is that they have “the bad habit of inadvertently integrating data that needs to be kept separate.” It is especially important in intelligence agencies to properly tag and control data so that sensitive information is seen only by those authorized to see it, he said.
Gabbard has drawn controversy and consternation since she took up her position in February.Trump has soured on her, excluding her from his inner circle of advisers, and the office she leads has experienced sinking morale, current and former officials have said.
A U.S.
Army Reserve officer and onetime Democrat whose isolationist tendencies seemed to align with Trump’s America First agenda, Gabbard instead has found herself marginalized on his national security team, most notably when she missed an early planning session for last month’s U.S.strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and was left out of a subsequent intelligence briefing to lawmakers.
Earlier this year at the White House’s request, ODNI’s analytic hub, the National Intelligence Council, produced a secret assessment on whether the Venezuelan government was directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua.The report concluded it wasn’t, undercutting Trump’s legal rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process under the Alien Enemies Act.
News of the report leaked to the New York Times, angering the administration.A top Gabbard aide sought to have that initial assessment revisited so the findings could not be “used against the DNI” or Trump.The revised assessment also leaked, and it eventually was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
All U.S.intelligence agencies, with the exception of the FBI, still concluded that Venezuela was not directing the group.
Gabbard then fired the National Intelligence Council’s two top officials, Michael Collins and Maria Langan-Riekhof, described by those who know them as veteran nonpartisan intelligence professionals.
She has also fired two people involved in FOIA matters, including one who facilitated the release of the Venezuela assessment, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The controversy over the assessment and the personnel removals dismayed and demoralized analysts.“This has sent a real chilling reaction throughout the intelligence community,” said one former senior official.“People are thinking, ‘I thought our whole point was to be an honest broker and to have the responsibility of speaking truth to power.’”
In May, the DIG released two Biden-era intelligence reports that Gabbard said proved that the former president was tagging opponents of his coronavirus vaccine policies as violent extremists.
The reports in fact assessed that violent domestic groups might use vaccine mandates to incite followers to violence.“The mere advocacy of political or social positions … does not constitute violent extremism,” one report said..
