In a study published on Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office said State should conduct a comprehensive assessment to help quantify the benefits of sending federal assistance and taxpayer dollars to assist other countries working to reduce cybercrime.

“In its leading role for foreign assistance, State has not conducted a comprehensive evaluation of how these activities have contributed to overall capacity building,” the GAO report states. 

“Without such evaluations, State cannot ensure that agencies’ individual activities or case-specific accomplishments are contributing to long-term success in improving foreign nations’ ability to more effectively combat cybercrime.”

The need to strengthen global cooperation comes after a two-year period in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has received a record number of cybercrime complaints and the intelligence community has noted an increase in ransomware attacks by transnational criminals.

The GAO report also found that officials at the State Department, the Justice Department (DOJ), Homeland Security (DHS) and experts from international entities have identified six mutual challenges in building global capacity to combat cybercrime. 

These included a lack of dedicated resources, difficulties in retaining highly trained staff, and inconsistent definitions of “cybercrime.” The expert panel also identified challenges in working with the U.S. government, including obstacles in obtaining information, lack of collaboration, and lack of dedicated funding streams.

State said it concurred with the final recommendation of the GAO report which asked the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to instruct the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Lisa Johnson, to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of capacity building efforts to counter cybercrime.

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Secretary Antony Blinken first introduced the concept of the new office in October 2021 during a speech on his wider modernization agenda, asserting that the State Department must play a role in shaping “the digital revolution that’s happening around us and making sure that it serves our people, protects our interests, boosts our competitiveness, and upholds our values.”

The office will bring on and coordinate additional expertise around tech policy, diplomatic leadership and strategic direction for State to address emerging tech, according to a release.

“We want the internet to remain a transformative force for learning, for connection, for economic growth, not a tool of repression,” Blinken said then. “We want to shape the standards that govern new technology, so they ensure quality, protect consumer health and safety, facilitate trade, respect people’s rights. We want to make sure the technology works for democracy, fighting back against disinformation, standing up for internet freedom, reducing the misuse of surveillance technology. And we want to promote cooperation, advancing this agenda tech by tech, issue by issue, with democratic partners by our side.”

During the same speech, Blinken also announced the department’s new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, which launched in early 2022.

Seth Center will serve as the deputy envoy responsible for standing up and building out the office. He will report to Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman through Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy Nate Fick.

“Dr. Center has extensive experience working at the intersection of national security and technology policy in and out of government,” said State Department spokesperson Ned Price during a press briefing.

Price added that the new office will “provide a center of expertise to develop and coordinate international technology policy, and to engage foreign partners on emerging technologies that will be transformative to our societies and our economies — including biotechnology, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum information technology.”

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Secretary Antony Blinken first introduced the concept of the new office in October 2021 during a speech on his wider modernization agenda, asserting that the State Department must play a role in shaping “the digital revolution that’s happening around us and making sure that it serves our people, protects our interests, boosts our competitiveness, and upholds our values.”

The office will bring on and coordinate additional expertise around tech policy, diplomatic leadership and strategic direction for State to address emerging tech, according to a release.

“We want the internet to remain a transformative force for learning, for connection, for economic growth, not a tool of repression,” Blinken said then. “We want to shape the standards that govern new technology, so they ensure quality, protect consumer health and safety, facilitate trade, respect people’s rights. We want to make sure the technology works for democracy, fighting back against disinformation, standing up for internet freedom, reducing the misuse of surveillance technology. And we want to promote cooperation, advancing this agenda tech by tech, issue by issue, with democratic partners by our side.”

During the same speech, Blinken also announced the department’s new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, which launched in early 2022.

Seth Center will serve as the deputy envoy responsible for standing up and building out the office. He will report to Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman through Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy Nate Fick.

“Dr. Center has extensive experience working at the intersection of national security and technology policy in and out of government,” said State Department spokesperson Ned Price during a press briefing.

Price added that the new office will “provide a center of expertise to develop and coordinate international technology policy, and to engage foreign partners on emerging technologies that will be transformative to our societies and our economies — including biotechnology, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum information technology.”

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Secretary Antony Blinken’s modernization agenda and the department’s first-ever Enterprise Data Strategy — signed one year ago this week — are changing the game. The Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS) helped the Department surge data policy, data engineering, and data science resources to high-priority, high-visibility mission and management topics in successive, six-month “data campaigns.” Already, data is informing decisions across management issues like anomalous health incidents and cybersecurity, crisis operations like the Afghanistan retrograde, and foreign policy issues including strategic competition with China and U.S. engagement in multilateral organizations. We see our unique “campaign” approach to delivering on the data strategy as a key reason the State Department is currently seeing so much success.

What makes our campaigns different? Oftentimes in government, a strategy is blessed by senior leaders and organizations commit to impossible goals, even over the long term. And organizational and cultural change in large government organizations is famously hard, even with senior leader buy-in.

Instead, we recognize that like any technical project, priorities change quickly. No proposed implementation plan would survive first contact with mission realities. The EDS intentionally promotes an abstract three to five-year “implementation roadmap” centered on delivering decision advantage through analytics, effectively governing data as a strategic asset, building a culture of data literacy, and developing the needed tech backbone. 

The data campaigns are vehicles for applying the EDS to targeted priorities with which the department workforce is already intimately engaged. For example, the first two data campaigns were strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and workforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Our bet was that if we could prove data and analytics — and a cultural mindset supportive of them — could deliver real, tangible results on strategic competition and workforce DEIA, people throughout the organization would start to trust that data and analytics could help with their mission too. Change by showing, not telling. 

Animating philosophy and campaign structure

The animating philosophy for our data campaigns is “12-8-4”: We plan to accomplish 12 things, we’ll get eight of them done, and that will still be four more than anyone thought possible. We back up this philosophy with an aggressive surge of resources to apply analytics to a topic with a go-fast, sprint-to-the-finish mentality. We believe the core benefit of a campaign-based approach to digital transformation is that high-priority mission and management topics motivate people to partner, get to yes, and deliver results more quickly and robustly than abstract strategic goals. No one gets excited about showing up to a “data quality working group,” but a working group on how to unlock HR data to dismantle structural barriers to racial equity in our diplomatic workforce? That’s an effort worth getting behind. 

Functionally, a campaign is all about integrated, cross-functional delivery across our own teams. Each campaign is assigned not just dedicated analytics teams, but also communications staff, data policy and data-sharing agreement specialists, and full-stack engineers. Cross-functional delivery ensures we are bringing the right tools to the problem. If what we need is a new data policy, not machine learning, we shouldn’t be technological determinists just because it sounds more innovative. Often what our customers need first and foremost is systematized, sustainable data management and information synthesis, not predictive algorithms. Our cross-functional teams ensure we have and deliver the right tools to the problem. 

Crucially, the campaign construct attracts executive attention. Working on the highest-priority issues means analytics teams get the attention and support needed from senior leaders to actually implement the strategy in the face of inevitable technical and bureaucratic blockers. In exchange, campaign teams are accountable for actually delivering value — not producing “shelfware” strategy-implementation status reports. Fortunately, this visibility has helped deliver results. And we’ve been able to build trust among data skeptics and help leaders and staff alike understand the value of data to their own goals – why analytics is not just a “nice to have,” but a “must-have” on foreign assistance, competition with China, diplomatic engagement, or crisis operations.

Data campaigns and beyond

To help bring better data to the massive challenge of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), we took a collaborative approach with Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley and her new Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Bureau of Global Talent Management, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Office of the Legal Advisor. After a six-month DEIA data campaign, we produced a baseline assessment available to the entire department to bring hard numbers to the challenge of DEIA. One career ambassador told us this effort was “the most transparent and actionable information on DEIA” they had seen in their 30 years of service. To build this report, our campaign team worked with partners throughout the agency to develop the first DEIA data policy in the history of the U.S. government. The policy has made HR information more transparent and accessible while protecting individual privacy and meeting all legal requirements. 

Our China work has also been essential to the Department’s growing focus on strategic competition with the PRC. First, we developed an analytics platform tracking PRC activities around the world, which is regularly used to inform our foreign policy, strategic planning, global presence, and resource allocations. We also took a hybrid subject matter expertise survey and algorithmic approach to recommend foreign assistance projects under the Countering PRC Influence Fund, aligning foreign assistance to strategic priorities. We have also built a prototype platform to derive insights from millions of diplomatic cables at scale using machine learning, which helps the State Department make fuller use of our most important novel data asset: on-the-ground reporting from our worldwide network of diplomatic posts. 

The value of data to diplomacy that these campaigns and other efforts have shown has begun to pay dividends elsewhere. We’ve seen record enrollment in the Foreign Service Institute’s training courses on data literacy and analytics and the inclusion of data literacy in promotion precepts for the Foreign Service. We are also successfully competing for the top data science talent in the industry. Over the past year, dozens of new data scientists joined the State Department across an array of mission areas and bureaus – not just the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions’ Center for Analytics. And State’s current initiative to hire at least 50 data scientists for positions across the department received over 400 applications in only a few days. As Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Brian McKeon said to Congress, it may surprise you to learn that top data scientists want to serve their country at the State Department, and are leaving top jobs in industry and academia to do so. With the unique opportunity afforded by the EDS and our data campaigns, this does not surprise us. 

When British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston received his first telegraph message in the 1860s, he exclaimed, “My God, this is the end of diplomacy!” Yet here we are, and needless to say, technology will never be the “end” of diplomacy. Rather, by infusing the art of diplomacy with modern technology and the science of data, we are strengthening the digital backbone of America’s diplomatic corps and ensuring the country’s oldest cabinet agency delivers results for the American people far into the future — one campaign at a time. 

Matthew Graviss is the chief data officer at the Department of State. Garrett Berntsen is his deputy.

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Government needs an independent analytic capability, composed of hundreds of federal and regional data analysts, that monitors S&T developments and flags unwanted technology transfers in real time for policymakers, said Dewey Murdick, director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday.

China has such an apparatus of more than 60,000 open-source collectors and analysts prioritizing emerging technology areas worth exploring and preventing it from being surprised by innovations.

“To my knowledge no part of the U.S. government, including the [intelligence community], has developed a scalable countermeasure to this Chinese approach,” Murdick said.

He envisions an entity that coordinates with agencies and receives funding for analysis tasks conducted by employees, half of which are based in the Washington, D.C., area and the rest around national innovation hubs.

The White House’s Critical and Emerging Technologies List and Bureau of Industry and Security’s emerging and foundational technologies list could help focus the analytic capability’s efforts, along with the National Laboratories, said Nazak Nikakhtar, trade lawyer with Wiley Rein LLP.

“I think the National Labs are a completely underutilized crown jewel in American policymaking,” Nikakhtar said. “And I think we really need to leverage them.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said the U.S. needs a national strategy safeguarding the U.S. and its allies’ leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology and precious metals needed for semiconductors.

The “wakeup call” was when policymakers realized China’s national champion, Huawei, had become the dominant global supplier of communications infrastructure poised to dominate the 5G and O-RAN markets, Warner said.

“This belated realization by American policymakers reflects a complacency with our own innovation and, quite honestly, a little bit of inattention to [the People’s Republic of China’s] objectives and efforts,” Warner said.

Those objectives aren’t secret with China publishing deliberate strategies and plans for creating an unfair, asymmetric trade environment that forces the transfer of technologies to its national champions — at the expense of their foreign competitors, said James Mulvenon, senior China analyst.

The Made in China 2025 policy aims to displace the U.S. standard of living by that year, and China also has a 30- to 50-year systemic plan to supplant the U.S. as a superpower.

“This is one of those intelligence challenges that lends themselves very easily to open-source intelligence,” Mulvenon said.

The strategies and underlying data are publicly available but in Chinese, the country’s “first layer” of cryptography, he added.

Elements of a national strategy to combat China exist, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to reveal a more comprehensive version last week, before getting sick with COVID-19

“I think that is coming eventually,” Mulvenon said. “The Indo-Pacific framework that was published gives us a lot of clues.”

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Without mentioning China by name, both parties acknowledged the threat foreign adversaries pose to the telecommunications supply chain.

In recent years the U.S. has struck similar agreements with the Western Balkans countries of Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia to assess the risk of 5G equipment supplied by vendors with connections to foreign adversaries, namely Huawei and ZTE, before buying.

“I think we’re setting a very strong example together here today, particularly on the need to make sure that when it comes to our most sensitive technology and networks, we’re working with trusted vendors,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Blinken signed the memorandum of understanding with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, noting the partnership between the two countries was “growing stronger, growing deeper.”

Albania was elected to the U.N. Security Council for a two-year term beginning next year on Friday. The country previously participated in a U.S. Army-led, joint military exercise with 27 European and NATO countries called DEFENDER-Europe 21.

House lawmakers recently reintroduced legislation that would see the U.S. Development Finance Corporation fund 5G infrastructure projects in 22 Central and Eastern European countries including Albania. The bill is seen as a counter to China’s Belt and Road and 17+1 initiatives seen as taking advantage of a region that’s historically lacked telecom infrastructure since the Soviet era.

“[W]e have undertaken these issues … asking also the other countries in the region join and to put all together our effort for a very secure path of communication,” Rama said. “And to put this path of communication of very critical services in the hands of the people of Albania, in the hands of institutions of our security forces, and to not allow compromise by third actors and sometimes-malign actors.”

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