Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief. I’m Preet Bharara, but I’m away this week. So John Carlin, my friend and former colleague, will be guest hosting the show today. John is a partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss and a co-chair of the firm’s cybersecurity and data protection practice. He served as a top level official in both Republican and Democratic administrations. John speaks with Dmitri Alperovitch, Chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a nonprofit focused on advancing US prosperity in global leadership. Alperovitch is also a co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity company. Here’s that conversation.

John Carlin:

Dmitri, welcome back. You just were in Ukraine. Tell me a little bit about how you arranged the trip and who you met with.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah, so it was a great trip. Very educational and very emotional as well. It’s, of course, one thing to see the imagery on social media or on television, it’s another thing to experience it and see the real impact of this war. Just even walking around Kyiv, which is a very normal city, very European city, all the shops are open, people walking around, and yet you still see a lot of amputees and the effect of this war be very real for people on a daily basis.

We had this driver that took us around for a couple days, and he had returned from the front recently because he has a newborn. When we were leaving he said, “I hope this war will be over before my son is old enough to serve 18 years from now.” So just really emotional and hits you to really appreciate the cost on a daily basis that the Ukrainian people are suffering because of this conflict.

John Carlin:

What motivated you to go?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

What motivated me to go is to try to get the real picture of what’s going on, particularly with this offensive that has just begun and to really understand what the needs are for the Ukrainian military, for the Ukrainian intelligence community. We met with very senior leadership in the Ministry of Defense, in the Ministry of Intelligence, Military Intelligence and the SBU, their civilian intelligence agency, we met with troops. So we got a really good sense of what’s going right, what’s going wrong, what they need going forward.

I’ll tell you, as you know John, I was born in the former of Soviet Union, so I speak Russian fluently and that I think definitely was a big differentiator for me because being able to speak Russian to these people, and everyone speaks Russian of course in Kyiv, is I think an enormous advantage because you get the real story and people don’t BS you as much as they might Western media or even Western officials because you can just say, “Oh, come on. We grew up in the same country, in the Soviet Union. I get what you want. Let’s talk real business.” That was really, really helpful. People were incredibly candid about their challenges, about how difficult this is. This offensive is incredibly difficult.

John, when we were leaving, we’re boarding the train … Of course you can’t fly into Kyiv, you have to take the train in and out about 13 hours … As we were boarding the train, suddenly out of nowhere you had a huge number, over 50 ambulances, just appear out of nowhere, and they were getting ready to pick up the daily wounded. They were coming in from the front.

John Carlin:

Oh, wow. So this is before you’re in Ukraine? You’re just getting ready to board the train to take you there?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

No, getting back from Kyiv.

John Carlin:

I see.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

The train basically daily comes in from the front into Kyiv to distribute the wounded across the hospitals in Kyiv. It was just row upon row upon row of ambulances, just non-stop occupying the entire train station. I was talking to some of the people, the train conductors, and they said, “This is a really good day because this is a fairly small number compared to the usual.” That just really gets you to understand in real terms what the impact is. These are ambulances of wounded, not even the ones that get killed.

The other thing that was really, really interesting is how the conversation and the focus of the conflict is very, very different from the discussion that you would hear here in DC and across Western capitals where the talk is all about what territory is Ukrainian going to capture. Are they going to succeed in this counter offensive to take the South or maybe attack Crimea at some point? That was not the conversation in Ukraine. In Ukraine, they were much more focused on the strategic issue of how does this war end and how do we make sure that we have durable safety where Russia does not attack us two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. Because they know that as long as Putin is in power, this is going to continue very likely. Even if he’s replaced, he’s more likely to be replaced not by a Russian version of Thomas Jefferson, but someone much more likely to be in line with Putin and his imperialist thinking.

We were there, of course, during the week of the NATO summit in Vilnius, and the Ukrainians were really pushing on the Americans and the Europeans to give them a deadline for when they could actually join NATO, not just kind of squishy talk of, “One day you will join when this war is over.” They want a sort of hard date or hard commitment on NATO and of course didn’t get one. There was a lot of frustration. They were telling me basically, “Don’t you guys understand that without NATO, we will never be secure?”

John Carlin:

I know one thing you do is, again with your language skills and background, and you monitor some of the chat, what do you think ordinary Russian folks on the street are saying? How does it compare?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

That’s a great question, John, because I think on the Russian side you actually have similar frustrations. They suffered huge casualties, and this war clearly is having a very negative effect on their economy. But there is, I think, a desperation in Russia where they don’t think that things can ever get better. That this is just the way it is, and you have to accept it. Russians love misery. They’ve experienced lots of misery.

John Carlin:

Do you count yourself in as a Russian on that score or have you become Americanized?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

I tend to be pretty pessimistic that today’s pretty good, but tomorrow will likely be worse, is something that you kind of take in with mother’s milk in Russia. Having suffered through numerous dictators, from the Stalins and Lenins of the world, the czars and so forth, they think that this is just a normal way of life, and they don’t expect things to get better. They don’t expect their government to do better for them like we do in this country. As a result, they’re just quietly suffering.

John, I read this incredible piece a few months ago that talked about the rape culture in the Russian military and how you have these women that sign up to be nurses and logistics people in the military. They go to Ukraine and they’re basically forced to be “field wives” for commanders and satisfy them sexually in a forceful way. This woman comes back from Ukraine just completely emotionally destroyed by what she had seen and experienced herself. Her reaction was the most unbelievable to me where she said, “Well, in a couple months I’m going to go back because-

John Carlin:

Voluntarily?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

“I can’t get a job here. I need money to survive, so I might as well go back. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a commander who won’t make me do this.” This is the reaction that you often get in Russia is that, “It’s pretty terrible, but we have no other choice.”

John Carlin:

You talked a little bit about frustration. I mean out of the Summit it seemed like there was surprising positivity from all sides, not just NATO, but from the Ukrainian delegation. Do you think the US and NATO are providing the support they should be providing to Ukraine? Should they be doing more? Less?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

It’s a really hard question. A lot of people say you look at all the military equipment that we’ve provided to Ukraine since the war began and really before then from the Javelin antitank missiles to now tanks themselves and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and artillery munitions and artillery systems and Patriot air defense systems and on and on and on, and there are people that say, “Well, if we had done that all before the war or even just as the war began, this would’ve had a very significant effect on the Ukrainian military’s ability to push back on Russia and potentially take a lot of territory.” That’s probably correct.

However, the other side of the coin here is that if we had done all of this, provided all of those munitions and weapons systems to the Ukrainians the first week of the war, we probably would’ve forced a response from Russia. The number one priority from the Biden administration, President Biden articulates it all the time, is that we want to avoid a conflict with Russia, essentially getting into World War III with the number one nuclear power. Russia has more nuclear weapons than any know other country in the world.

John Carlin:

You said that too, Dmitri. Early on, I remember you warned in The Economist and elsewhere that we have to be very careful in our response to avoid starting an escalation pattern.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah, and I think the administration has done this very well where they realized that boiling the frog and sort of dripping those weapons systems in, yes, it’s having of course devastating effect on Ukraine. They’re suffering a lot because of it. They’re suffering enormous casualties, but it likely has avoided an escalation and avoided Putin being forced to respond against us. Of course, counterfactuals are hard, and we never know what would’ve happened in the other scenario, but it’s likely at least that he would’ve felt obligated to respond to something of that size.

Now, the real problem here is that the Ukrainian military is still not a Western military. They don’t have a great Air Force. They’re flying these old Soviet jets. They’re completely outranged by the Russian jets. They don’t have bombers that can go over these minefields and destroy them. The US military would never fight this particular offensive like the Ukrainian military would do. We would never enter those minefields before we would obliterate them with B-2 bombers, just carpet bombing the entire field before the infantry would drive in. But that’s not an option for Ukraine. You can’t necessarily turn them into an American military. The cost would be too great. It would take too long. So they have to do with what they’ve got as unfortunate as it is.

They’ve done terrifically with that so far. They’ve taken back Kharkiv oblast, they’ve taken back Kherson, they’ve been able to inflict enormous casualties on the Russians and their offensive. Even though they were able to take Bakhmut, the cost was very, very high. But this is very difficult and very likely it’s going to go on for a long time. The Ukrainians are preparing for it that Putin is not going to stop.

I think that’s one of the things that there is a lack of appreciation of in our country and across Europe is that we’re in for the long term. In fact, if you look at history of conflicts, of wars, they tend to kind of cluster around two extremes where wars are either very, very short, they’ll last a couple of months, or if they go beyond a year, they tend to go for a very long time and take many years. In some ways, this war has been going on for nine years already since 2014, so it-

John Carlin:

That’s a good frame.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

May very well go for another nine years.

John Carlin:

Do you think Putin … I mean, he says this openly really, but it’s clearly a part of his strategy is that he just does not believe that the West is capable of a sustained engagement and that he can outlast the West. That’s clearly part of his calculation. Do you think he’s right?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

That’s certainly the strategy. There are two aspects to it in terms of evaluating whether he’s right or not. One is a political will, and certainly we’re hearing from Congress that there is tiredness that is setting in both on members and frankly even on their members of their districts. I was talking to centrist Democrats, centrist Republicans that were telling me in the last couple of months that they’re hearing from their constituents saying, “Why are we spending so much money on Ukraine when we have all these issues at home? Lack of healthcare, rising crime,” and so forth. So there is that pressure that’s bubbling up from the bottom up.

Then you have members of Congress on the Republican side, more on the Right Wing of the Republican side that don’t want us to fight this war to begin with, to supply Ukraine at all. You’re looking at this debt limit deal that was passed even in the face of Freedom Caucus opposition in Congress and you start wondering, can you get another 40, $50 billion package passed the House to assist Ukraine going forward because they’re going to need it? They’re going to need more artillery munitions, they’re going to need, if they’re going to get fighter jets, they’re going to need F-16s, which are very, very expensive. There’s a question of how do you actually get them the funding through Congress that they would require.

Then the second element of this is that on certain things we actually have very little to give them now. There’s been this big debate about whether to give Ukraine cluster munitions because of a number of countries banning them and humanitarian concerns around cluster munitions. The Biden administration just last week decided to do so because we have no artillery munitions to give. So the 155 mm artillery shell, which is sort of the mainstay of US and Western artillery systems, we’re very low on our inventories. In fact, it is now well publicized that the large quantities of artillery shells that the Ukrainians are using in this counteroffensive came from South Korea where US basically bought it from South Korea and provided it to the Ukrainians. Well, guess what? The South Koreans don’t have any more to give, and we are ramping up our production, but it’s not going to go into effect until 2025 at the earliest. So-

John Carlin:

Let me pause you for a second on the cluster munition question. Saying we couldn’t provide the type of conventional artillery that they needed, and so the decision was made to provide these cluster munitions. One of the reasons they’ve been condemned for use is that many of them don’t explode and so like mines, remain and can be picked up by children and others and cause terrible injuries and damage later. There was a debate about whether to provide them, and I know one school of thought was that is a terrible choice, but they’ll be deployed defensively in Ukraine by a government under attack and that’s a choice that should be made by the Ukrainians, and they’ve asked for them. There’s another school of thought that says every time you facilitate their use, you’re setting a standard for other countries around the world to use them, and they are a crime against humanity. Where do you fall on the scale? What do you think the right choice was?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

I was not opposed to providing them. By the way, the US military uses them. Russia certainly uses them. Plenty of countries around the world use them. There are some countries that have signed up to this ban on cluster munitions, but most major countries, Russia, China, US, have not. They’re a powerful military tool. They’re very effective. Yes, probably somewhere around the order of 25 to 30% of them will not explode, and you will need to do significant cleanup afterwards to make sure that you reduce the chance of civilian casualties.

But by the way, much of Eastern Ukraine now is littered with mines, anti-personnel mines. So you already have an enormous problem on that front, and cluster munitions in the magnitude that they’re being provided are really not going to add significantly to that already humongous problem. I don’t think that, for me, this was not a controversial decision at all. I understand sort of the geopolitical concerns around it, but the reality is that if you want Ukraine to have a chance to succeed in this counteroffensive, they had to get them. There was no other option. I’m glad the administration came out on that side.

John Carlin:

In terms of staying power, you had this bizarre spectacle play out with Prigozhin and his aborted march towards Moscow, his disappearance, his reappearance, all sorts of different theories about what’s going on inside Putin’s Russia. Was this something that was discussed while you were on the ground in Ukraine? What do you make of it?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

We did. We did. We talked extensively to Ukrainian military intelligence to understand their view on this. The prevailing view, and I think it’s the correct view, is that Prigozhin got a little too cocky, that this was not really coup against Putin. I don’t think that this was an attempt to change regime in Russia, but he thought, quite mistakenly and quite stupidly, that if he had this demonstration of force that he could actually get Putin to fire Shoigu, the Defense Minister and Gerasimov, the Head of General Staff and potentially get one of his own supporters, like General Surovikin for example, who built much of the fortifications that the Ukrainians are now trying to penetrate, to be appointed to those positions. Or maybe even Prigozhin himself maybe was eyeing becoming the Defense Minister.

That was of course a really dumb idea to begin with because even if he had succeeded as clearly was his original plan to capture Shoigu and Gerasimov when there were on a trip to Rostov, that city that he ended up taking, Putin would’ve never caved to his demands. No leader would’ve caved to blackmail like that. So it was always an idiotic idea. I think he got overly confident because of the importance of Wagner over the last year in this war in Ukraine. They were the only ones that achieved any sort of successes since the early days of the war by taking Bakhmut, by taking Soledar, these places in the Donbas. He thought that he had become indispensable, and of course no one is indispensable. Putin saw this as a direct challenge to his rule, which it was, even though this was not directed at him, it was directed at Shoigu and Gerasimov. But you can’t just do that in any system and expect the leader of that country to just go along with it.

John Carlin:

Well, we’re not just talking about any system either, we’re talking about someone who’s notorious for disappearing, torturing, killing through means of the state or assassination, his political enemies. Did this weaken Putin by showing someone who was this capable of not just dissent but moving troops towards Moscow? How do you analyze the fact that he’s still alive to tell the tale right now?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah, so this is really interesting. A lot of people I think, misunderstand Putin. They think that, because he’s a dictator and he clearly is, that he is like another reincarnation of Stalin and he is nowhere near as brave as Stalin or frankly as bloodthirsty, although he’s plenty bloodthirsty. But yes, he has killed political opponents. He has poisoned them, he’s conducted certain assassinations, but only for people that are actually weak. He’s never taken on people that are strong, and Prigozhin and Wagner are armed to the teeth, they’re highly experienced, they’ve been fighting in wars all over the world, in Africa and Syria and Libya and now in Ukraine since 2014. So this is not someone you just can easily disappear.

I think that’s what’s given Putin a lot of pause is that for the first time in his rule, he’s not just confronting someone like Navalny who can get maybe 10,000 or 20,000 people out on the streets to protest in Moscow. He’s confronting a military that is very strong, an armed force, and that is something that he is not brave enough to confront. He was missing in action for the first 13 hours of this mutiny, I think trying to figure out what he’s going to do. So he really showed his true colors. You’re seeing right now a very interesting thing taking place in geopolitical relations where Turkey, President Erdogan has done a complete 180 on Russia over the last week by saying that Ukraine should join NATO, by allowing Sweden now into NATO, by releasing these fighters from Mariupol, the Azov fighters that went to Turkey as part of the deal with Russia, that they would not return to Ukraine before the war is over. He released them, and let them go back to Ukraine. So he’s clearly antagonizing Russia.

I think there are probably a number of reasons for it, but one of them is likely he’s looking at put Putin and he’s thinking to himself, “When I had a coup launched against me in 2016, I arrested 50,000 people, including people that had nothing to do with this coup. I cracked down, and this guy’s incapable of doing not only that, but also even putting in jail the guy that started it.”

I do think that Putin looks incredibly weak both domestically as well as on the global stage. Now, that doesn’t mean that he’s in danger of getting overthrown. He still faces a problem or not the problem, but from his perspective, the situation that there’s really no opposition to him.

John Carlin:

Let me ask a little, just on the personal front. For those who don’t know your background, can you talk a little bit about your memories of being in the former Soviet Union and moving, I guess, first to Canada and then to the United States?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah. So it was actually my first time, believe it or not, coming back to former Soviet Union.

John Carlin:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

I’ve been to the Baltics but haven’t been back to Ukraine or Russia since I left.

John Carlin:

Well, you won’t be going back to Russia any time soon-

Dmitri Alperovitch:

That’s right.

John Carlin:

That’s because you were sanctioned by Putin, which must have been a bit of a surprise to you.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

It was a surprise. The only surprise was what took them so long, because obviously I’ve done a lot of work to be on his radar for many years in the cyber arena, highlighting the operations that the Russian intelligence was conducting against the United States in many situations. But yes, certainly Russian vacation plans are not on our trip calendar any time soon. But being back in Ukraine was very interesting. Obviously the country has changed a lot since I’ve last been there, but in many ways it hasn’t. The people are still the same, and they are incredibly resilient like they’ve always been. It was quite nostalgic to go back there.

John Carlin:

You moved to the United States. What was it like originally being a smart young, what were you? 13?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah.

John Carlin:

Living in Tennessee.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Well, it was a little bit of a culture shock as you mentioned, John. We first moved to Canada to Toronto, which was actually not that big of a change. We lived in Moscow, big city, moved to Toronto. I spoke English very well because I’d learned it from a young age. But then I moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was a very different experience.

At first, I thought that they didn’t speak English because I couldn’t understand anyone anymore. I remember my first experience in high school. The first day this kid comes up to me, and he asked me where I’m from, and I kind of hesitated saying Russia because the Soviet Union had just ended, and this is deep South, so it wasn’t quite clear how people felt about Russians. So I said, “Canada,” where I just arrived from. He said, “Where’s that?” That’s when I knew that my answer was not very relevant to the outcome of the conversation. But look, I loved growing up in the States, going to college here. I’m an American citizen, very proud of this country. So very, very happy certainly that my family was able to immigrate and that I’m not currently in Russia being conscripted to fight in this illegal atrocious war.

John Carlin:

You’ve had enormous success here and created really an innovative company on protecting companies against cybersecurity threats. As you’ve said as well having intelligence arm of the company that laid out and made public for the first time what certain nation states, including Russia were doing. I want to turn to that for a sec, but before I do, one question for you. There’s been this brain drain, the Russian intelligentsia, many have fled, hundreds of thousands it seems have fled, and they’re kind of the Dmitris of the next generation. What do you think the long-term impact will be, and do you think there’s more we should be doing in the US to welcome them here?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Oh, absolutely. I think the Biden administration, Congress have done a very good job, I think, overall managing the escalation of this crisis, supporting Ukraine. But the one thing that I wish we were doing, and I realize this is a very toxic political issue, but welcoming these people with open arms, either Ukrainians or Russians that are well-educated that can be contributing to the success of America like I have, like many of my immigrants, fellow immigrants have. Many of the companies now, the largest companies in the world that are American are run by immigrants, whether it’s Microsoft with Satya, whether it’s Google with Sundar, whether it’s Sergey Brin that helped to start Google. So immigrants, I think, have always, over the course of the history of this country, have contributed massively to its success. You have a unique opportunity right now to allow, whether it’s smart Russians or smart Ukrainians that are looking to leave and make a better life for them and their kids, to come here, to start companies, to contribute to existing companies. I think we’re missing that opportunity.

John Carlin:

One of the reasons that’s been articulated why the West needs to stand strong with Ukraine and stop Russian aggression is in part to stop a different tragedy from occurring, and that is to prevent a Chinese invasion, a People’s Republic of China invasion of Taiwan. You’ve been warning in thought as of a year or two ago that neither Taiwan nor the United States was taking the prospect of such an invasion seriously enough. What do you think today?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Oh, I’m incredibly concerned about the prospect of Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would be catastrophic for the United States, for the world because there are two potential outcomes if such an invasion takes place. A, we get into a war with China over Taiwan, which would very likely be World War III between two nuclear superpowers that are highly well-armed and capable of inflicting just enormous damage on each other. Or two, we stand by and let China take over Taiwan without interfering, which would result in our immediate loss of all influence in the Indo-Pacific, the part of the world where 70% of the world’s trade is, really the future of this planet. That would have catastrophic implications for US’s ability to maintain its global position as the world’s only superpower. Both are, I think, terrible outcomes for America.

I don’t necessarily think that Ukraine and Taiwan are linked, as many people are arguing. Whether Russia is defeated or not in Ukraine, I think, has very little bearing on President Xi’s decision to take Taiwan, which I do think that he is very intent on doing. Obviously he’s looking at this conflict, he’s learning from it. To the extent that the West has come together to punish Russia economically, he is concerned about that and trying to think of ways to isolate his own economy from the types of sanctions and export control measures that we’ve lobbied on Russia in the event that he invades.

But there are numerous reasons why I think he’s interested in invading Taiwan that have nothing to do with Russia, that have nothing to do with Ukraine. I don’t necessarily think that this is sort of a new domino theory, a lot of the domino theory of the 1960s that Vietnam falls, the rest of Asia will become communists. I don’t think that the same is going to happen if Ukraine does not succeed. Although there are very good reasons, of course to support Ukraine. I want to make it very clear to your listeners that I’m a big supporter of Ukraine and want to help them win this war and defeat Russia. But I think the two issues are not quite linked.

John Carlin:

Talking a little more about China, last week we saw news that right after Secretary Yellen had met about in part seeing where we could restore economic ties, there’s news of yet another hack by the Chinese government, this time of the Commerce Department and of the Secretary of Commerce’s email account. It looks like the vulnerability was through Microsoft. I know you discussed a little bit how much in the SolarWinds Russian intrusion, that a lot of the actual issues, the hacks that took place because of the vulnerability in SolarWinds, were through Microsoft and that they were unable to be detected because of Microsoft. What do you think of what you’ve read about the current hack?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Well, first of all, on the China front, as you well know, John, because you actually were on your first trip to the Justice Department back in 2014, you led the first prosecution of foreign intelligence officers for cyber espionage when you indicted PLA officers for doing that, the Chinese have been very aggressive at this for two decades now, over two decades, stealing everything under the sun, whether it’s from domestic industry, from government agencies, using cyber as an incredible wealth transfer mechanism to empower their own companies to become the global behemoths that they are now, companies like Huawei, for example.

When it comes to the Microsoft issue, I do think that they would do well from more transparency. When I was reading this blog that they published this week on this hack of Cloud accounts, including of Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo on the Microsoft platform, there was an interesting wording there that talked about how the way that the Chinese had gotten into all of these different accounts was by using one of the Microsoft’s private keys, one of the most sensitive crown jewels that any company has, these private keys that are used to sign code or sign authentication requests. They said that the adversaries had “acquired” them. I thought that was a very interesting word to use-

John Carlin:

I noticed that too.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah, I mean, what does that mean? Did they go to the store and acquire a private key? Chances are that they stole it from Microsoft. There’s no details on how that happened, what else they may have stolen. So I do hope that folks at Microsoft who do great work on cybersecurity, they have really phenomenal people there, they collect a lot of intelligence, that they really become more transparent and forthcoming when issues occur like this one and others, and really tell the whole story of what’s going on in their private security front and not try to sweep in under the rug and use kind of legalese language to make it seem like everything is hunky-dory. Hacks happen. This is something that I think-

John Carlin:

Can I pause you one sec though on the key? Could you just explain for our listeners why that’s so significant?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Sure. Again, we don’t have much information on exactly the type of key that was taken and how it was taken, but any time you have a sensitive private key that is used across the entire Microsoft platform to either allow for people to log in into accounts or to sign code that can run on Microsoft’s platforms like in their Azure Cloud or on Microsoft Windows operating system, that is a huge problem. Those keys literally have to be some of the most sensitive pieces of data that Microsoft has in their possession that has to be highly, highly protected. If they had been compromised, that’s very disturbing. So understanding was that an insider, was that a intrusion to Microsoft that enabled that to happen, how did they “acquire” them? I think that’s really, really important.

But the broader point here is that we need to start destigmatizing hacks. The reality is that cybersecurity is really tough. You’re defending yourself day in and day out against highly capable adversaries that have a lot of resources, and mistakes happen. They happen to everyone. I think every major security company at this point, including my previous company that I founded, has had security issues. We’ve come forward and others have come forward and told the story. The more companies do this, the more I think it makes everyone appreciate that this is really, really hard. The nature of the game here is not to stop every hack because that’s impossible but to try to mitigate the damage, to make sure that attackers are not succeeding in their ultimate objectives, that they’re quickly discovered, quickly contained. The more information we can put out on the failures can help educate everyone. So I would encourage Microsoft and everyone else that’s getting hacked to come forward and reveal those details. It’s incredibly important.

John Carlin:

Let me switch one last to a technology of the future that I know you’ve been pretty, as usual, blunt and open about. On this, you’ve said that you made a mistake and that you’d been an AI skeptic, and you were surprised at the speed with which the generative AI rolled out and how revolutionary it is. Now that you’ve seen this change, what do you think we should be doing particularly around cybersecurity in response?

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Yeah, so the most amazing thing here is that I’ve been involved in AI or machine learning as it used to be called for 20 years, working on algorithms in cybersecurity space to use these technologies. When I say I was a skeptic, I was certainly a great believer in their ability to help humans make decisions faster, sift through large portions of the data. What I did not expect is they would come so far along in such a rapid period of time, really without changing underlying algorithms to a great extent. The algorithms that we’re using now in these generative AI models, these so-called transformer algorithms, are basically neural networks that had been invented all the way back to the 1960s. Some modifications over time, but really not sort of revolutionary or drastic. But what has changed is that we have thrown mind-boggling amount of compute, of raw GPUs, graphical processor units, at this problem. That alone has given us these incredible advances that no one could imagine even just 10 years ago.

Of course, computing power continues to scale, even though there’s some implications for Moore’s law in the CPU area where there’ve been quite a few slowdowns in GPUs, they’re still advancing pretty successfully. So you can expect that at least for the next few years we’ll continue to see some dramatic improvements in this field.

I think it has both positive and negative implications for our society. On the positive front, it’s going to be an enormous productivity tool, one that we can’t even imagine right now where so much of our capabilities are going to be augmented by artificial intelligence. For one, the most basic one that anyone can see now is that virtually every computer interface is going to be English going forward, because you can just ask a question and that will be converted by AI into instructions for the computer. Where you’ve seen that in software engineering where instead of writing code, you can simply ask the question, that code will be provided for you. It’s not great yet, you still have to vet it. There’s still hallucinations that take place and so forth. But you can see where this is going to go and go very quickly.

There are dangers to it as well. One of the dangers that I’m very concerned about is actually not in cybersecurity, because in cybersecurity I think you have this unique dynamic of a cat-and-mouse game where an adversary gets an advantage and then defenders respond, and that will continue, and AI will be used on both sides with some success. But where I worry is actually in the terrorism front. One of the things where AI holds, I think, perhaps the greatest promise for our human civilization is in the area of biotech where you can use AI to invent new drugs … We’re already starting to see some of that … Invent cures for diseases and the like. Enormous promise in that space. But it comes with downsides.

In addition to inventing new drugs, you can ask it to invent new pathogens that can kill people and create terrible biological weapons. So we need to be very thoughtful about who has access to these capabilities and what kind of questions are allowed to be asked and what kind of answers are allowed to be provided in those systems, particularly when it comes to providing information that can destroy humanity. Imagine someone asking ChatGPT, “How do I build a nuclear weapon? How do I build this particular pathogen?” Those are not the questions that should ever be allowed to be asked or answers provided.

John Carlin:

We’ve seen a version of this with a technology that had far less dramatic consequences, but still was utilized by terrorists in terms of how to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom suddenly became much more accessible just due to social media. We saw it exploited by terrorist groups. So your points are well-taken.

Dmitri, I want to not just thank you for joining us today, but also you are an example of why smart immigration makes sense. Your contributions to the country through CrowdStrike and defending so many companies in different ways, but also your contributions to our intellectual debate. We didn’t really dwell on it, and we may have joked around a little bit about it in terms of you being sanctioned, but not unaware of the fact that there’s personal risk that you take on when you were so outspoken about Putin’s regime before the aggression in Ukraine. I think spotting, trying to spot and warn that an event like this was going to happen and that that put you and to some extent your family at risk. So thank you for the courage to state your true views and for joining us today.

Dmitri Alperovitch:

Well, thank you so much, John. Right back at you. The work that you’ve done in government and outside of government in this space, going after terrorists, going after other nation states that do this country harm has been immense, and you’ve made this country much more secure. So thank you for that.

Preet Bharara:

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Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Technical Director is David Tatasciore. The Senior Producer is Adam Waller. The Editorial Producers are Sam Ozer-Staton and Noah Azulai. The Audio Producer is Nat Weiner. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.