Good morning. Good morning and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. We'll confine all questions about Richard Sherman until after the briefing. Thank you for being here this morning. We've got some weather coming into Washington, so it's great to have such an excellent turnout. This is obviously a very timely briefing, and we'll get right to it. I'm joined here by my colleagues from the Russia-Eurasia Program, Andy Kutchins, Dr. Andrew Kutchins, who is our Russia-Eurasia Program Director and Dr. Jeff Mankoff, who is his deputy. I'm also joined by the Honorable Juan Cesarotti. Juan, of course, was deputy national security advisor during the Bush administration as a senior advisor here at CSIS and our key person on counterterrorism and many other issues. So with that, I'd like to offer Andrew Kutchins the microphone and we'll get started. We'll have some brief remarks to open up and by our principals here, then we will open it up to your questions. Thank you for coming. Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to CSIS. As Andrew said, I think we're all glad you braved the rumor of a snowflake in Washington, D.C. later today to come here this morning. It's always a good thing before doing a press briefing to just check the news, and so I checked the Moscow Times and the title of the story was Potential Suicide Bomber Reported in Sochi. Now, you guys have already probably heard about this story. There's two parts.  And supposedly this is a video of the two suicide bombers who conducted the acts in Volgograd. Maybe. I don't know. I watched the video, you look at these guys, and they look a little bit like Wayne and Garth in a Saturday Night Live skit. And I do wonder whether some of this is a hoax conducted by folks. Imagine yourself in a dorm room in a university. This could be... I don't want to take this lightly at all, but when I look at this, this is sort of the first thought I had. And then the story of the suicide bomber, Rustana Ibrahimov, who's supposedly been spotted in Sochi reported by Alexander Valov, the head of blogsochi.ru.  It says it was unclear whether Ibrahimov was carrying any explosives with her. It was also not immediately clear how a suspected terrorist, who was supposedly interrogated by law enforcement officials in the past, could get into Russia's Olympic capital and heightened security. She was... Valov published a copy of the official letter sent by the local FSB to the Krasnodar Anti-Extremism Center, asking them to chase the subject. That's a good idea. Who arrived in Sochi on January 10th or 11th. Alexander describes Ibrahimov as someone who limps, quote, limps slightly, her elbow does not bend, and she has a 10-centimeter-long scar on her left cheek. How she got past the security does make one wonder whether, again, actually, is this really true? Or could this be a hoax? And if it's not a hoax, then how could someone who obviously looks like an extremist Shahidka, actually is an extremist Shahidka, has been interrogated and identified as an extremist Shahidka, could get through security. It doesn't give one great confidence. Anyway, we can talk more about that later, but it is unusual. These games are unusual.  My suspicion is never. And that's a hint that these are... and it's a press conference which actually heads of major news organizations actually showed up. So this is a rather unusual event. Let me start by saying these games are very, very personal, I think, for Vladimir Putin. I mean, has any Winter Olympic Games in history been so identified or attached to a national leader as these games are to Mr. Putin? I mean, in 2010, was anybody talking about Stephen Harper much when the games were in Vancouver? Or George W. Bush in 2002 in Park City? Actually, ironically, the Park City Games, if they gave any political... if they were politicized for anybody, they were a boost to Mitt Romney, who was running the games at the time. But this is pretty unusual. Now, you probably have to go back to the 1936 summer games in Berlin, Hitler's games, the Nazi games, to have a games that are attached, that are so politicized in a way. I don't mean in any respect to compare Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler or current Russia to Nazi Germany, but it's just a comment in that the nature of these games, those might have been games where you would have a CSIS if at times CSIS it existed. So why? Well, I think it goes back to, first of all, when Putin personally went to Guatemala City and ironically on July 4th, 2007, and he gave a very convincing and impassioned speak to the Olympic Committee to award the games over the other three finalists at the time in Austria and South Korea. And he convinced the Committee to award the games to Russia. Now, and for Putin, he said this on numerous occasions that he looks upon, you know, holding an Olympic Games, you have to be a country that actually, to put it in layman's terms, it has its act together.  This is not a small undertaking to put on an Olympic Games. And so this represents, you know, this is not Russia of the 1990s that was, you know, the wild, wild East, you know, where we had the images of the Russian mafia basically running the country to the extent that it could be run, or organized crime, or actually I refer to it as disorganized crime. No, this is Vladimir Putin's Russia in which he has restored a sense of order and stability to the country, and the country is suddenly finding itself much more wealthy than it was. So the timing. Now, in 2007, this is after, literally, Russia became financially sovereign. 2005, Russia pays off its debt to the IMF. In 2006, it pays off its debt to the Paris Club, so Russia is financially sovereign, which means in Putin's mind, and I think appropriately so, that Russia is politically sovereign. Russia is actually a real independent country again. And so the timing that he can go, then go down to Guatemala City and do this is significant. Remember, it was 2006 that Russia held for the first time the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg. Now, I should have thought at the time that 2014, probably if, you know, Russia is hosting those Sochi Games, that should have been a big hint that probably Vladimir Putin would be joining Russia in 2014. I didn't quite put that together at the time, but I should have. And so thinking into the future, I would think, well, Russia has also won the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Now, that's going to be after the 2018 presidential election, so my bet is that Vladimir Putin will also be presiding over the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Assuming things go well here in 2014. Now, why are the games unique as well? Well, first of all, there's the location for Putin. This is very personal as well. He spends a lot of time down in Sochi in the context of the Valdai Discussion Club, a group that Jeff and I have met annually with Mr. Putin and other Russian leaders. Several times we've gone down to Sochi to meet him at his nice spread down there, shall we say. And Sochi, well, it's kind of like a Russian California. You can swim in the sea in the morning and then you can go up the mountains and they're only 45 minutes away. You don't have to drive three and a half hours, four hours, or if you're in traffic, like six hours to Tahoe, and you can ski. You've got this very unique combination and it's kind of bizarre that Russia, a country that's known for being a northern country, is hosting the Winter Olympics in a subtropical climate. Go figure. But the really significant thing about Sochi's geography, obviously, is its proximity to the northern Caucasus. And this is also a very, very personal issue for Vladimir Putin. I mean, his rise to political stardom in Russia, to have a national caliber, took place when he was initially Prime Minister in the fall of 1999 when the Second Chechen War started. And the First Chechen War, of course, was a representation of the humiliation of Russia, where Russia effectively lost a civil war on its own territory. Russian troops performed miserably. In the Second War, particularly in the beginning, Russian military forces, other security forces performed better than they had and the perceived success of those early strikes on the terrorists in opposition in the Second Chechen War were a big boost for Putin's popularity. And it was where Putin also kind of bonded with the Russian people with his, you know, his kind of macho way of being. You know, he said famously, I'm going to wipe them out in the outhouses.  Okay, guess what? You know, Russia, you've got to get the vernacular, actually what Putin was saying, because Russia is a rich, Russia is a rich language, and it's also a very rich language of four-letter words. Or in Russian they call it mat, that's tied to the word mother. You hear what I'm saying? So, think of what you said, it was basically I'm going to eff them up in the blank houses or in the speepers, okay? I mean, really, that's what he was saying, okay? He was much more kind of earthy and down to, yeah, I'm going to mess these dudes up. And he saw this as part of his mission, that he was going to deal with the separatists and later terrorist groups with this threat in the Northern Caucasus, initially in Chechnya, and because he saw it literally as a mortal threat to the Russian nation. And so his MO is he brought stability and the fact that hopefully in Olympic games for the first time in history can be held in such close proximity to a conflict zone. Now, it's a relatively low-level insurgency going on in much of the Northern Caucasus today. Again, is a totally unique aspect about these Olympic games and it's why we're having this press conference here. And if you can successfully hold these games next to this area, which Putin saw as his mission as Russia's leader to bring stability to, then yes, he's been successful. So he's got a lot riding on it. Just a quick word about the controversy over the LGBT legislation, which has attracted so much controversy, the law on propaganda against pedophiles and homosexuality. Many have asked the question, why in the world would Putin and the Russians implement this piece of legislation on the eve of this big international event when they know it's going to attract a lot of negative attention and press? Well, you know what? The legislation, in my view, is not really addressed to the international community. It doesn't really care, frankly, about what the international community thinks about this. Although, in his press conference, he will defend it in kind of comparative terms that look actually our legislation is quite liberal when you compare it with most of the rest of the world, etc., etc. It's aimed at a domestic audience and it's done for domestic political reasons, I think, to support his constituency. Now, let me say a quick word finally about the terrorist, which that would be a good segue over to Juan because I'm going on too long. The terrorist threat is very real. Regardless of what is true or not true about this video and Rustam Ibrahimovic, etc., and obviously the tragic terrorist acts in Volgograd that took place a few weeks ago at the end of 2013 attest to that. But I think what we're talking about right now really aren't separatists. So, Doku Umarov is head of the Caucasus Emirate, which in principle talks about establishing a separate Islamic state in the Caucasus. That's not really the ideology that motivates I think these people at this point. I think they're motivated by a global jihadist ideology, which is common to that of al-Qaeda and others around the world. This is what motivated the Sarnayev brothers in Bubam, the Boston Marathon, who are also from Dagestan in the northern Caucasus in last year. Now, Doku Umarov himself, he may have been a Chechen nationalist 15 to 20 years ago, but again if he's still alive, he utilizes a global jihadist ideology. This is what you'll see in what he said, particularly what he goes back to in July 13th, in the games and with other subgroups that are kind of affiliated loosely with the Emirate, this loose network. So, with all that, Putin's got a lot riding on the games and Sochi is the holy grail, I would think for a terrorist, Islamic jihadist terrorist individual or group to go after. And so in a way, we have kind of the ultimate showdown because for Putin's got a lot of riding on it. This is a very juicy target. This is sort of in American vernacular, it's high noon at the OK Corral. In Russian terms, it's Kto Kavo. Who's going to get whom? Or in Spanish terms, this is mano a mano. Or in NFL football, this is Richard Sherman versus Michael Crabtree last Sunday. Who's going to prevail? The question though, and this is where I leave it to Juan who really knows something about these groups and individuals, is one of operational capabilities. I mean, Sochi is supposedly under lockdown, although you read a story like this, you go, really? You know, but you don't necessarily have to hit Sochi to spoil the games. This was my concern when I, my response to the Volgograd bombings a few weeks ago. You know, a series of Volgograd caliber attacks would virtually terrorize all of Russia and spoil the games, and that would be a great tragedy. Finally, just a word about Umarov. Is he dead? I'm kind of skeptical about that. I mean, the reportings of Mr. Umarov's death have been many in the past. And one would think in particular that if he were taken out by the FSB, the Russian authorities, you know, they would want to show the video of his dead body to bring greater sense of calm about the games themselves. But, you know, whether he's dead or not, I'm not sure how much that would actually make a difference in that I don't think that Umarov is as much sort of operational capacity as, let's say, Shamil Besayev did ten years ago. And the network is so loose itself that maybe the absence of his leadership would leave others possibly, okay, competing to carry out or to be able to claim, taking the responsibility for carrying out the act which would gather all of the attention. But, you know, let's all pray that that doesn't happen. Thank you very much. And for any difficult questions, my colleague Jeff Mankov will address them. Thank you. Thank you, Andy. And we've had an interesting confluence of events of events in D.C. today. We have D.C. schools are closed, Virginia and Maryland schools are closed. So I think our children, all when they were flipping back and forth between SpongeBob this morning, learned how to curse in Russian. So this is great. Thank you for that. Juan, I'll leave it with you. Thanks, Andrew. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you all for attending. Andy, it's great to be here. I think part of the reason you get great attendance is because CSIS has great expertise in you and your team. So really a pleasure to be here. What I wanted to address was more specifically the terrorist threats and to give you some perspective. In particular, from my vantage point, when I sat at the White House and at the Treasury Department, when we worried about security of every Olympic Games post 9-11. Because the reality is the security of the Olympics, whether they're in the United States or in London or in Athens or in Sochi, become a principal concern for policy makers around the world because the Olympics become such a target-rich environment for terrorist groups, including those that have designs not just globally, but perhaps locally and regionally. And I think the security concerns with respect to Sochi are even greater and even more justified in this regard. And let me explain why. The terrorist groups led by the Caucasus Emirates, but not solely, and their affiliates, but also Central Asian groups like IMU and IJU have the clear intent to try to disrupt the Sochi Olympics, or at least to embarrass the Russians and in particular Vladimir Putin who has so personalized the Olympics and the success of them, as Andy has described. The intent has been declared. Doku Umarov, this past summer, has been very clear about the desire to have major attacks on the Olympics, or at least major disruptions. Significantly in July, he lifted the putative ban on the attacks on civilians, which in many ways opens up the target set for terrorist groups to attack softer targets, transportation hubs, civilian sites. And they clearly have the desire to engage in these attacks, as seen through their video postings, their blogs, and their communications. And so the intent is clear and it's there, and it would have been obvious, even absent their open declarations, but the open declarations have really made it very clear for authorities. They also have the capability. We've seen that with the three attacks in Volgograd in September. We've seen this in their past attacks, in particular those directed by Umarov since 2009, the high-speed attack between Moscow and St. Petersburg, the airport attack, and other attacks that have predated. What's interesting and important here is that the Caucasus Emirates and their various groups and operatives have demonstrated multiple modalities in terms of attack vectors. That is to say they can use a variety of means to attack, not just a variety of targets to focus on. And so they've used suicide bombers to include the now-famed Black Widows. They've used teams of operatives. They've used assault teams. They've vectored against airplanes and metros and trains, hospitals, security sites. And so the modalities and capabilities sort of match here in that they have a target-rich environment, and they've demonstrated the ability to organize different types of attacks based on the opportunities available to them. And that's why the reports of a singular Black Widow getting into Sochi becomes concerning, in part because you have the potential that she's a singular actor intended to disrupt, but it also could be that she's a part of a broader series of suicide bombers who've been dispatched to attack different sites. And so no doubt the Russians are following not just reports of a singular actor but multiple threat threads and individuals that they're concerned with. Lastly, they have the opportunity. The Olympics, as we all know, is center stage. The world's media will be trained on the Olympics, both the activities, the social activities around it. In addition, you have the proximity, rather brazen on the part of Putin, in a sense to place the Olympics so close to the caucuses and to give the terrorist actors who are used to operating in this environment the opportunity to plan attacks not just in Sochi but in the immediate environs. And as Andy rightly said, the terrorists in this context for the purposes of disruption and embarrassment don't necessarily have to get into the inner rings of security within Sochi to have a declared successful attack. They need only create a sense of terror or disruption in the immediate environs or even in the transportation hubs, as we've seen with Volgograd, to create a sense of instability. And I would dare say if you saw a successful attack significant enough, even in the far abroad from Sochi, for example, in Moscow, you would begin to see debates in delegation circles as to whether or not to withdraw athletes and to stop participation in the Olympics and that would be disastrous for the success of the Olympics. A final point in terms of why this threat is so unique at this time and I think it has gone relatively unreported but I think it's critically important as an accelerant to the threat. And that is the fact that, as Andy said, we are talking about a movement and a set of actors who themselves as part of a global jihadi movement. And so this in many ways is born out of the Chechen conflicts and insurgencies of the 90s and early 2000s but these groups have been animated and populated by global jihadi actors, many of whom have interacted with the leadership of the Caucasus Emirates, many of whom have gone on to fight, including now in places like Syria. And I think it's critically important to keep in mind that the Russians have taken a very open and active role diplomatically in supporting Assad which has brought Russia back into the center as a far enemy for the global jihadi movement. And you've begun to see that narrative play out in some of the terrorist discourse and I think that becomes important as an accelerant because Russia is not just an actor in regard to the Chechen or Dagestani or Ingushet insurgency or fight but is also a global actor in the context of the global jihadi narrative. And Syria in many ways is a key accelerant to that both in real terms and in ideological terms. What are the concerns for the U.S. in this regard? And I think you've started to hear more and more about this from U.S. lawmakers and security officials. But there are threefold. First, the obvious fact that you have a real terrorist threat here. These aren't just imaginings or sort of one-off threat threads that have to be chased down as often the U.S. has to do. But this is a real terrorist threat that exposes athletes, sponsors, U.S. citizens that are going to attend the event. Two, you always have the question of venue security raised very good question as to how secure actually are the rings of security around the Sochi venues and sites. But how well are they secured? You can secure the venue but have you secured well enough where the athletes and sponsors are staying? If you've secured that, have you secured well enough the ingress and egress, the transportation in and out? And so the raw security questions emerge as very important questions. And there's growing sense of lack of confidence in that security even despite the Russian assurances. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you've started to hear including from Chairman Rogers of the House Intel Committee, concerns over lack of visibility and cooperation from the Russians. As I was mentioning to Jill before we started the remarks, usually what you have in the Olympics is most countries very prideful wanting to secure the Olympics, manage it themselves and to succeed for national pride and other reasons with the U.S. offering support and help in a variety of ways. Most countries don't accept the support initially because they can do it themselves. But as you get closer to the day of the event, most countries begin to accept more and more of the assistance because the reality of the daunting task of securing the Olympics and frankly of the threat to Western athletes and sponsors becomes more real. That I don't think is happening in the Russian context. In fact, I think the reverse is happening, that the Russians have grown more and more concerned over the threat and are concerned over the perception of insecurity and therefore have not wanted to allow the United States and other security services in on the ground to assist. In an Olympics like London, as you can imagine, U.S. worked very closely with British security officials to create cohesive command centers, response plans, etc. That in my estimation is not happening in the context of SOCHI and that has created concern is why I think you started to hear U.S. officials speak openly about those concerns. In addition, that's why I think you started to see reports today in the press about contingency plans that the U.S. is making for potential worst case scenario. Transport aircraft being prepositioned, naval aircraft, naval resources and warships being placed offshore in the worst case scenario if, for example, you had wounded athletes or citizens you needed to get them out. And so you're going to see a lot more of that where the U.S. is trying to vector and take into account the fact that we don't have on the ground cooperation resources as we have in the past. Now, very quickly, the challenges for the Russians and for the international community, because I think this is not, you know, any Olympics is an international event despite the fact that it's been so personalized by Putin and the Russians. But the Russians have to not only secure the sites as they're trying to do with physical security and intelligence and vetting of individuals, but they are going to want to disrupt as much as possible any terrorist activity abroad. And this is why you've seen the reports of the death of Doku Umarov. I think that regardless of whether or not it's true, it's an attempt to demonstrate that the Russians are doing something to try to disrupt these activities. And I agree with Andy that with respect to the individual, I think it matters much less as to whether or not he's alive now with respect to the Security Olympics because I think all the terrorist groups that want to attack the Sochi Olympics know that they want to attack the Sochi Olympics and will try to do so. They obviously need to secure the site and they need to worry about the perception of security. I think this is key because, again, you could have a relatively minor terrorist attack during the opening ceremonies or something in the general environs and it begins to affect the sense of security for the Olympics and in many ways the terrorists begin to win in terms of that perception. A quick final note that we often forget but is squariling the minds of security officials. You have not just the Winter Olympics in February, but you have the Paralympics in March. And so you have two sets of events. That are critical internationally that require the Russians to engage in security not just in the month of February but February through March. And I would dare say that the terrorists probably would prefer to attack the Sochi Olympics in February but if they could launch significant and serious attacks against the Paralympics or those environs around it, they would probably view that as successful. So this is a two-month endeavor for the Russians that is going to be fraught with real threats and real concerns for the Russians, the U.S. and others who have Olympians at the site. Great. And with that, we'd like to open it up to your questions. Questions, please? Jill. Thank you. James, I'd like to ask, to follow up on that U.S. side of it, what does the United States do? To your knowledge, what is the state of play in terms of any type of cooperation in potentially coming in and getting Americans out of there, either people who are competing or tourists or officials? And what does the U.S. do if they do not have permission on the ground? Let's say how do they work that out in advance? You were mentioning that. What's the next step for the United States? What's happening right now? Well, ideally in the Olympics, what you would have is, you know, State Department diplomatic security officials, FBI and other U.S. security officials who are cleared in to the various venues or cleared in to a command center or in some way integrated into the on-the-ground security. I'm no longer in government, so I don't know what the status of that is, but I would dare say, given the public comments that we've seen, that the U.S. government probably is not getting a lot of billets, so to speak, a lot of clearances for individuals from the State Department, from the FBI and others to be on the ground at particular sites. Now, that's different from security for individual teams and such, but I would venture to say that we're doing the best with what we can on the ground, and what you've seen and started to see publicly is contingency planning, which would be led by the State Department to try to determine what happens in the worst-case scenario, and that's why you've seen the reports of movement of U.S. military assets and personnel in this regard. And so you would have the State Department leading that planning, trying to determine how best to get citizens in and out in case of an emergency, and you would hopefully have pre-cleared plans and clearances for ingress and egress in the case of an attack in Russia. But I would assume that the Russians are going to want to control any of that. Any security service in any country is going to want to have full capability and control over what happens after an attack or a worst-case scenario. And so it's likely the case that the U.S. doesn't have pre-clearance to move choppers in or assets in in the event of an emergency. That's probably going to have to happen as events unfold. This gentleman, if you could identify yourself in the microphone, that'd be great. I think the Syrian foreign fighter problem, and in particular the flow of caucus-based fighters in and out of Syria, amplifies the concern, I think. And part of this is, again, the ideological and narrative dimensions of what this does to animate the threat, but also populates sort of the environment with other actors who are trained, tested, and perhaps willing to attack. Keep in mind that the Syrian conflict has now attracted more foreign fighters than we saw in the Iraq conflict and more than what we saw during the Afghan Mujahideen days. And so this is a very serious threat, and you've seen plenty of reporting of Western European services, North African services, Gulf services, very concerned about the flows of fighters in and out of Syria. And the one thing I would say is concern that officials should have, at least, is that the survival rate appears to be much higher in the Syrian foreign fighter context. Whereas in Iraq, what we saw was foreign fighters would flow in, but they wouldn't flow out. That's not necessarily the case here in Syria, where you have foreign fighters already starting to flow back. And what that means for the Russian service's ability to monitor who's moving in and out of Syria, I don't know, but it's certainly something they should be concerned about. Just to follow up on that, there are reports of hundreds of foreign fighters from the North Caucasus in Syria itself. So there's no, how many actually are there, it's impossible to say, but there are many there. And this is one really big reason, and I think it's been underestimated over the past two-plus years for why Putin's held this position on Syria as he has. Because when he looks at the, when he looks at who are the most effective fighters in Syria, he sees the same kinds of individuals in groups, sometimes literally the same individuals in groups, that he's been dealing with in the North Caucasus, or that he and his Central Asian colleagues were dealing with back in the late 1990s in particular, coming out of Afghanistan. And that is in particular why this is, the issue is deeply, deeply personal for him. And there's some, I think if the Syrian conflict had receded and foreign fighters were leaving Syria, I think there's no doubt in my mind at least that that would increase the danger that those from the North Caucasus or others, maybe even not from the North Caucasus, would return there and increase the threat there. A friend of mine was a month or two ago at the airport in Istanbul transferring and he heard Russians spoken by people who clearly looked like what you would imagine a foreign fighter in Syria to look like and it was rather unnerving since he himself at the time was transiting into the not the Northern Caucasus, but the South Caucasus. Bill Douglas, right over here. Jeff. Well, Putin in his press conference just the other day noted that no, Russia has not had the experience of securing an event of the magnitude of the Sochi Olympics. So the answer is no. I mean, you'd have to go back to the Moscow Olympics in 1980 you know, for a I think an international event of this magnitude which quote-unquote Russians had to deal with that was in the context of just having invaded, attacked Afghanistan which of course led to the essentially the creation of the Mujahideen and much of the problem that we see here today. So the simple answer is no. You know, one can speak to this much more effectively I think you know, we never know the number of successes in preventing terrorist attacks. We only know about the failures but simply the fact that we saw significant failures in Volgograd three times in the recent the end of last year, October and two in December. Piatta Gorsk even closer to Sochi also at the end of the year you know, the daily bombings and problems that they are in the North Caucasus. Now it's not at the frequency of what we're seeing in Iraq right now we're listening to the radio and there are 25 car bombings a day approximately but so magnitude for sure is a no. The capacity of the FSB is very, very hard to say but I think to get back to Juan's point earlier you know the fact that the Russians have been reluctant to embrace support from the United States I think partly out of reasons of you know, intelligence cooperation is a very, very delicate matter in the best of times. We had pretty effective intelligence cooperation with the Russians after 9-11 in fact I think at that time the Russians were probably providing us as I've heard, you know, more high quality operational intelligence than we were able to provide them but you know, we know that the relationship and the level of trust between the two countries has deteriorated significantly since then and that's a problem for sure and then there is the sort of the nature of the Russian kind of psychology and it's not just the Russian psychology but maybe more so that we can do this on our own and we don't need your help and then for Putin, you know, this is such a sore spot because it's like we did not recognize in his view soon enough and I think he's got a legitimate beef about this that the nature of the threat even in the 1990s and the First Chechen War when it was mostly a movement of national liberation there was a significant, you know foreign element there fighters, also sources of financing and training and training for them that factor was much more significant in the Second Chechen War and it really rankles him deeply deeply that this was not adequately adequately recognized and this is a harping on the double standards that only accentuates I think some of the chip on the shoulder so to speak about this forum now I think the State Department did a very smart thing in a few years ago in actually putting Doku Umarov in the Caucasus Emirate on the list of recognized terrorist groups and individuals but some would say in Russia that was too late too little and too late and finally we have to look at what happened with the Sarnayev brothers the fact that there was inadequate communication between US and Russian intelligence services tracking and following these guys and when the elder brother had gone to Dagestan which is really now the heart of the sort of Islamic threat region in the North Caucasus for six or seven months how effectively were they tracking him we just don't know and not knowing doesn't lead to increased confidence my suspicion that it's both Jeff do you want to I would just add two things on this topic one and you've heard a lot of discussion of this in the Russian press recently in terms of the capacity of the security services they're essentially structured differently from the way that security services in the West are structured their main goal is regime security rather than public security let's say and obviously with a high profile very politically significant event like the Olympics those two things are connected but nevertheless I think that the goal of the security state that Putin presides over and indeed out of which Putin himself came is very much directed more at insulating the regime from pressures coming from outside rather than it is towards securing the public in general and I think one of the challenges that apparatus faces in the context of the Olympics is trying to make that pivot to do more of a public security role precisely because of the political importance that it has and I don't know about their capacity to do that the second point that I would just emphasize here and this is something that we haven't talked about but I think it's really important in a lot of context related to the Olympics is corruption the discussion in Russia has a lot of in the lead up to the games is really focused on this element on the amount of money that's been misappropriated, misplaced gone into dodgy contracts and offshore bank accounts by almost all accounts these are going to be the most expensive Olympic games ever upwards of 50 billion dollars as much of a third of that may have just simply been embezzled or stolen now what does this all have to do with security well I think operationally the security services can be supremely effective but they're only in the macro sense as effective as their weakest link and in a lot of cases the weakest link is corruption if you think about some of the successful attacks that have been carried out in Russia over the last decade or so the one that really is really striking I guess is the when two female Chechen suicide bombers blew up Russian aircraft in about I want to say 2007 or so I don't remember exactly 2004 okay and essentially what happened was these women bribed their way through security checkpoints they bribed the guards at the airport they came onto the plane even though they hadn't gone through the proper procedures they weren't searched and then they detonated suicide bombs when they were on board so the system can be set up in a way that's designed to focus on these kind of threats but it only takes one person one corrupt guard who's willing to look the other way in exchange for a bribe of one kind or another to have the entire thing come apart and for a successful attack to be pulled off and I think that's one of the real unknowns as we think about how secure the Olympics are going to be that's a very important point and just note that one of the planes that was targeted in that 2004 attack was headed to Sochi interestingly one thing I would say about the Russian security services is they are ruthless and effective when they want to be and if you look at the history of U.S. designations of individuals terrorists from the Caucasus regions or otherwise most of those individuals end up dead because the Russians kill them so the Russians can be ruthless and effective when they want to be there are huge limitations and I think they're going to be challenged here I'm Fatima Tlesov, Voice of America Russian Service my question is anybody who takes it in their latest statement the Dagestani Ansar Alsuna took responsibility for Volgograd but also they threatened to attack Sochi including chemical weapons how serious this this threat can be in your opinion is there any connection to Syria in your opinion, thank you I think to Andy's initial point I think part of this is building the perception of insecurity and so you have to modulate one's reaction to anything that terrorist groups indicate but you have to take it seriously of course and I know one of the concerns that Russian and U.S. officials have had for a long time is the ability of groups in the Caucasus to get their hands on WMD whether it's chemical weapons or nuclear components and that has been a source of great concern for a number of years I think the fact that Syria is a cauldron of conflict and you have chemical weapons available to the actors there certainly heightens that concern but I myself have not seen anything in the open source reporting or otherwise it would suggest you've had sort of a caravan of chemical weapons moving to Sochi for attack seriously and no doubt it's something the U.S. authorities are looking at in terms of threat vectors It's an excellent question although I thought you were going to bring up the Circassian question which is an excellent question also but I'm sure somebody will subsequently it was very striking to me in the diametrically opposed responses of U.S. and Russian officials to the August 21st brutal chemical weapons attack in Syria the largest one that had been it has been perpetrated by a long shot and it puzzled me a lot and in thinking about I was trying to think of what could be a plausible case where actually the two sides aren't fundamentally disagreeing so much and the plausible case I suppose would be that actually the Russian government response that the Assad forces had no incentive to use chemical weapons since they knew that was the only contingency which would possibly bring upon an American military strike there's a logic to that for sure but there's a corollary logic to that as well I think that if the opposition somehow could gain control of some chemical weapons in Syria make it appear as though the Assad's forces had carried out that strike there would be a huge incentive for them to do that because of course that would not only bring on the American military strike but much more significant American and other international support for them in their fight against the Assad government and knowing at the time that before our agreement on the chemical weapons initiative the diffusion of chemical weapons sites around Syria there's so many sites it just seemed that gosh it would only take again one person or one group to get a hold of one site amongst 40 or maybe even more than 40 that existed to be able to have access to the weapons so I think all of this only is supporting what Juan is saying we have to take this very seriously and because of the boundary or transnational nature of the groups and individuals that are fighting in Syria now certainly the one issue in fact this is the moment in which the US-Russia relationship began to turn around somewhat last year over the chemical weapons initiative and subsequently in our talks about the Iranian nuclear weapons program but it's whether it is true or not what they are saying it's certainly clearly something has to be taken very very the utmost seriousness in the US today Andrew I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on the hoax element of this and whether we might expect to see more sort of reports coming out in the next two weeks before the opening ceremony and also what are your expectations for protests for human rights anti-gay legislation that kind of thing particularly in the zone that they've you know set up outside the park far from the park sorry in my opening remarks I was a bit too flippant I think maybe and you know although there is somewhat of a when I look at the picture I look at the video it just it does make you think this could be a total hoax you know someone just having fun like the the intern at KTVU KTVU news in San Francisco who fed the report to the teleprompter after the Asian airliner kind of crash landed in San Francisco about the names of the pilots that supposedly the first one's name was why so low and etc sort of that kind of someone trying to be funny but not really funny but I think we're going to see I would expect to see more reports like this for the reasons that Juan elaborated simply to enhance the sense of insecurity around the games now there have to be to really be effective there do have to be some terrorist attacks to accompany it but I would expect to see more of this in the weeks ahead I can only say that I'm very relieved at least to this point we haven't seen any more attacks of the magnitude of what we saw in Volgograd three weeks ago because my greatest fear, I think the fear of probably all of us was that that could be the beginning of just a series of attacks that could take place on a weekly basis or even more frequently that would effectively destroy the games whether or not Sochi was attacked itself on the LGBT issue you know, of course Putin tried to sort of deflect that in his press conference although in doing so it only kind of I think probably enraged many in the LGBT community more and then there's supporters more with the way he looked no one's going to get thrown in jail this kind of legislation is actually more liberal than in many other places and really what we're only talking about is propaganda about this that's been disseminated but finally just leave our children alone the effect he was trying I think to address the problem to diffuse the problem I don't think that was a very effective way of doing it, shall we say and all I can say is I hope that the Russian authorities have learned enough from the response they've seen to the issue over the last few months that they will handle it with the utmost care and do their best not to inflame the issue and responding to any kind of sort of act or demonstration or statements that take place but after following Russia's so for so long sometimes I feel that you can never underestimate their capacity to cut their nose off despite their face but maybe Jeff has something more to say on this well, I don't know but on this question of hoaxes or threats that may or may not actually be real or that may or may not lead to attacks I think this gets back to the point that Andy made towards the beginning about how these particular games are such an important political project for Putin personally and for the Russian regime more broadly there's a particular narrative that Putin and the government are trying to get across and they're using the Olympics in order to advance that narrative about how Russia has recovered about how it's back on its feet about how they've succeeded in bringing stability not only to Russia but specifically to the North Caucasus which has been such a volatile area for the last two decades and so to the extent that the jihadists, the insurgents who are changing that narrative succeed in getting the discussion surrounding the Olympics not to be that Russia's back on its feet that Putin has brought stability but rather that there's this instability that there's this insecurity and that's what everybody is focusing on then I think it really gets at undercutting that message that the government is trying to get across regardless of whether there's a successful attack obviously if there is a successful attack that changes the narrative even more but even if there's this kind of low level chatter that basically takes the attention of everybody who's going to Sochi and who's looking at the Olympics off of the attempts to use this to bolster the prestige of the regime then in some sense that's a success for these insurgents as well I think there's Putin has been very successful as many in his foreign policy in the past year successful Sochi Olympics kind of accentuates it it takes the eyes off other issues that are going on inside Russia because some things that are going on inside Russia are actually quite problematic when you look at one of Putin's the most important reason why Putin is popular in Russia is because Russians are living more prosperously than they ever have in their history and he experienced this remarkable period of growth from 1998 to 2008 had the dip after the financial crisis came back to a level of about 4% growth which was okay not where they wanted to be but since Putin has become president Russian economic growth has actually fallen close to zero in 2013 it was 1.3% in the last quarter of 2013 it was close to zero and when it comes we're falling so the sense that he has brought prosperity to Russia the Olympics go badly then they're disgruntled and people are looking around and saying actually this guy things aren't going so well economically right now in Russia if you were to have a dip in the oil price which is so important for the performance of the Russian economy then one can actually start imagining a scenario his leadership is really under much more pressure than one would have imagined so there's also I think an element of have the world focus on the successful Russia they're going to come to Russia and see what the new Russia is like it's completely different from what the old Soviet Union was like this is not your father's Buick this is the new Russia this is one reason why they've spent so much money even if a lot of it has been embezzled or what not as a showcase just one quick point the question about protests is a very interesting one an important one because in planning for the security of any event whether it's a G20 meeting or the Olympics you've got to account for a multiplicity of disruptions or potential disruptions and so to the extent that there's been planning I'm assuming that there's planning around everything from dealing with low-level criminality all the way to high-end terrorism and in between there are disruptions tied to demonstrations or unanticipated gatherings of individuals that could be disruptive and could then combine with other threats to create a problem so your question is a good one because we've been focused on the terrorist threat and the security around that but any security service that's looking at a major event like this is looking at a full suite of potential disruptions and has to be taken into account both singularly and then in combination Charlie Erickson with Hispanic Link New Service in Washington here in Washington to what short of any kind of disruption or attack might cause the United States to withdraw from their perception from the Olympics and secondly what do you know about what preparations Mexico and Latin American countries are taking to ensure the safety of their athletes You want to do this in Spanish? I don't know specifically what the Latin American countries are doing. What happens in events like this is that you have a reliance on the host country to provide the adequate security, the communications usually most delegations have their own security officers protocols the U.S. is certainly sort of best in class in that regard and probably the most demanding international player in terms of security for its athletes and citizens To answer your first question I think absent an actual attack what would be disruptive to U.S. participation in the Olympics you know the only thing I can imagine is if there were a very serious credible set of threats directed at U.S. athletes or at venues that U.S. athletes would be attending combined with the sense that the Russians aren't sharing enough information about what's being done to counter it and a sense that we have an inability to counter it ourselves and a sense of serious risk to our athletes that is imminent that is a material and that can't be countered then you would start to see a discussion in the situation room around what is to be done but that kind of decision is taken incredibly seriously nobody wants to see the Olympics disrupted pulling the American athletes out would be disastrous for everybody I think that would be a big victory and so you would want to take that decision very carefully and only in the most serious of situations excuse me with that I would like to thank everybody for coming out this morning this briefing will be archived at csis.org you can follow our twitter feed at csis for updates and we will have a transcript out later which will release on twitter at csis csis.org thanks very much for coming this morning


Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Sanjay Sardar. He is the VP Modernization and Digital Transformation at SAIC, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me.  Why don't I start by asking you to sort of break down the principles of good data management. This is what we're here to talk about. Yeah, so yeah, and when you say it that way, it makes you feel very old, but no, I've done data management for a long time. The key to data management, some of the principles are understanding kind of what data you have, where it is, what's the value of the data. That's the key that everyone's trying to bring. In the last 20 years, we've seen an explosion in the amount of data that we are handling. So really, how do you get through all that data? How do you understand how to manage it? Where do you put it? And then really understand how to use it. What is that value of all of it coming through? Some of it is just machine data and noise that you're looking at that's important for certain aspects but doesn't really add much value to the overall working of the agency or organization you're with. And others are very valuable data that you can't really do anything with unless you manipulate it in some way or some fashion. So data management takes a lot of different practices and different ways to look at it. So we've been doing master data management, metadata management for a long time, which helps understand what that data is, but then what's the provenance of the data? What's the governance of data? What policies around it? Where's the security of the data? All those factors play into when you're looking at data as an enterprise. Julia, talk about SAIC specifically. I mean, the long history working with the government and many, many contracts, broad range of services. But now with the modernization focus, the conversation is about agility, speed, modernizing government, private public sponsorships, partnerships, responsibility and accountability. All these things are in a melting pot. What is SAIC like today? What's your specific role here in the Washington DC Republic sector? Fair enough, so SAIC is almost a 50 year old company that we've been around the government sector for about that long. We've done everything, we do everything from data management to software development to infrastructure and hardware. Pretty much a whole gamut of IT services. And we've worked with almost every federal agency in the area in the country. We've, from a modernization perspective, what we're looking at is the federal government is at this tipping point. We have a lot of legacy systems, we have a lot of old aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced, that needs to be upgraded and modernized. This is a national security issue. We're getting into a point where things, if they start failing, it'll be very catastrophic for the US as a whole. So where we are right now is we're trying to work with the government to bring in new technologies. As you said, it's a melting pot of things that are happening. Not only has data exploded, but the technologies that are being used have also exploded. You're seeing a massive consumerization happening. Biggest example is the Apple iPhone. When the iPhone came out, that consumers, that model of the Apple i-Store or being able to do everything from your phone is something the government has to get to. That's where you're looking at the UI, UX models. That's where you're looking at different workflows being moved to the cloud. How do you handle all that? Government used to be a consumer of technology. Now they're a regulator of technology. That's what the discussions are. They're looking at using data and technology for their workloads, so it's not so much a supplier-consumption relationship. They're much more active participants in the technology scene. The question is, do they really understand what's going on? Because if you don't understand it, you can't control it, you can't regulate it, you can't utilize it properly. This is the number one conversation around modernization. What are the key factors, in your opinion, that the government needs to do better? Is it the procurement? Is it just awareness, what's your thoughts? That's a loaded question. There's a lot of things going on there, yeah. And you're right. The government has become a consumer of technology. I mean, it used to be, back in the days when we were launching missions into space and putting man on the moon, the government was a leader in technology. Now with the commercialization, government has actually become a consumer of all these types of technologies and a creator of tons of data. So managing that data, and managing and understanding that data is very critical. How do you use it to add value to what the government's doing? And then further down the road to what the citizens are doing. How do you add value to the citizens' life? In doing that, there's a lot of different things that have to come into play. One, as I said, technology is a big part of it. Understanding what technology to apply. It's not just about replacing technology. That's not what modernization is. Modernization is how do you change and digitally transform your workloads, your workflow, how you do business, that's really where the value add comes in. To get there, yeah, you have to look at the technology, you have to look at the procurement practices, you have to look at different pricing and consumption models that the government hasn't been used to in a long time. When you look at these traditional contracting models, they may not apply to some of the new ways of consuming technology for the government. The world is absolutely changing. What will it take though for the government to become a more savvy buyer? I mean, what are some of the things that? I think the government's already starting to become a more savvy buyer. Again, remember, the FAR, as when they talked about it, the Federal Acquisitions Regulations, it's a massive volume that's probably 1,000 pages long. So there's a lot of opportunity to interpret that correctly. Where we're changing now is how do you interpret it? So there's fair practices for all competitors in the government market. And you're starting to see that. You're starting to see procurement officers look at things differently. You're starting to see CIOs demand different services. They almost cannot do it. The computing storage power is necessary. It's way too hard to go the old traditional routes. It's interesting, Rebecca. We talk about data all the time. We just read Informatica World. They're kind of supplier. They do the cataloging stuff. We're here at Amazon, multi-clouds of big conferences. So Amazon's one of the biggest cloud. Andy Jassy was just on stage last night in Arizona at a conference, talking about responsibility around recognition. So all these hot AI data issues, everything's a data problem, right? But yeah, we talk about government, but it's just not just government, it's public sector. It's federal. But it's also international nation-state competitiveness. So there's a lot going on in such a short period of time where analytics and data are a key part around the future value. So it's almost the whole world has twisted upside down from just 10 years ago. Oh, easily. Your thoughts on what's going on and what the public sector community, because a lot of these environments don't have huge IT budgets. But now we're seeing things like ground station, satellite, new stuff happening. Yeah, NASA, NOAA, yeah. Yeah, so you're right. This explosion of data has really caused government, and in fact, every industry to change. More industries are becoming digital industries than where they were manufacturers. Things like Uber and all those industries that popped up because of the data. That's what government is also turning into. They are starting to understand that all the decisions that government makes has to be done through a data-driven model. They have to have this evidence-based decision-making process, and you're seeing that because of the federal data practices, the data act, data management act, the creation of CDOs in every agency. This is really pushing the government's really recognizing data is an asset. It's a value-added asset that they have to use better to add value to the citizen's life, to what they're providing. It wasn't necessarily front and center on the quote data balance sheet, if you will, or the valuation of data wasn't always looked at that way. It was actually the perspective, understanding, and- It's a huge shift, like I said. When you look at the rise of the CDO, the Chief Data Officer in the federal government, that's a really big indication that data has now become looked at as an asset. The CIO was responsible for all the technology and they're governing all the technology and they're the owner of that. The Chief Data Officer is now doing the same thing from the data side. The governance, the policy, the usage, the cooperation across multiple agencies, multiple countries, as you said. Are agencies deploying CDOs across all agencies now? I think you're seeing more and more of the CDO being put out there. So, in fact, almost all of the agencies that I work with have a CDO already in place or are hiring one in the next three months. Why is modernization such a contentious topic? Is it because everyone has a different definition of what modernization is? It seems to be contentious when I talk about with folks is like, I mean, what does it mean? I don't know modernization is a contentious topic in the sense of I think everybody recognizes that they have to modernize. It's how do you do it? We are in a world where we have so much legacy infrastructure, legacy applications that are tied so closely to mission. There's a risk of how do you modernize? If you don't modernize correctly, you might affect mission. And when you're talking about things like in the DOD where that leads to potential in theater situations and problems, that's a big problem from the DOD side. In the civilian side of the house, the same thing. You know, if your taxes go up by 45% because you know someone messed up on the modernization side, that's a problem. So we have to be careful. Every agency has a personal journey. What SAIC, when we look at this, working with our partner systems, we look at an agency's personal journey. Everybody's going to do it differently. So I think the contention comes in as how do you do it? When do you do it? What do you attack first? Where do you look at the challenges and value ads are? Because everybody has to do it. Budgets are shrinking and security is important. Workload is kicked around a lot. Applications used to be the old word. We have an application sits on the server. It runs kind of monolithic, but the applications and the workloads are what really is the goal. Agencies get their own unique solution that taxes is for taxes, make that go better. So the role of data and cloud is different per workload, per environment, per mission. Very well could be. I think it's ubiquitous that there's a compute and storage factor that everybody has to use. But the workloads that really transform the digital mission are very different from agency to agency. So you have to look at what are they valuing and where are they going with it. So agencies like PTO, they're looking at how do I more effectively use our examiners time versus agencies like NASA, which are looking at how do I do higher level compute and HPC type work. So. One of the things you talked about when we first began our conversation is not only the explosion in data, but the explosion around the technologies and tools that are used to store and manipulate and execute decisions on the data. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing? For example, AI. I mean, this is all the buzz that all the big technology shows that we go to around the country. And it's maturing, but it's certainly, there's not a lot of adoption in the government. So you're right. Along with this data explosion, we've seen a technology explosion and the different types of tools handling the different sectors of managing data. Storage is what we talk about all the time because if so much data, you can't actually access all that data at once. So there's segmentation in the data that you have to look at. Companies like Cohesity are doing a good job of handling and managing that segmentation in their hyper-converged storage architectures. But we're also looking at in the AI world, yes, AI is artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning. These are all techniques that are working very well for certain types of data usage and data problems. But the adoption is not as widespread because they're new technologies. I mean, AI is where data was, like I said, 20 years ago. So they're starting to understand, how do I use AI? What do I use it for? That natural, that learning process that AI goes through to say, okay, I'm going to make something more efficient. How do I do clustering of that data? Where do I actually use that? When you have large volumes of data, security, for example, is a great example. When you look at security logs, lots of volumes of data coming out of that. But to use AI to learn which vectors the next security threat's going to come through, that's a pretty daunting challenge and not an easy one. And you have to find use case like that. So artificial intelligence, I think has a large promise in the world. There's image recognition that is working very well, image recognition and classification, natural language processing, to look at different core sets of data in the research community or in the patent community. Those are very good examples of how AI is being used today, but if there's a long way to go and there's a lot to be learned still. There's a lot of technology behind storing it. One of our sponsors that sponsors theCUBE, Rebecca's Cohesity, they sponsor us at AWS events that we always thank the sponsors. They're in the business of scaling up storage. So it's not that easy to store it. So you have not only just figuring out the business model behind how to use the data, there's also the technology around storing it cleanly without hiring away. Talk about the dynamics around tech in terms of managing the data. Well, so as you said, there's a storage aspect of it. There's a retrieval aspect of it. There's a time aspect of it. All of that leads to, yes, data is so valuable and so large and so woman is now doing all of those things matter.  I mean, that's the kind of area where we're in. So when you look at the segmentation of data, near line storage versus online storage, well, the near line has to be almost as fast as the online because now we're looking at things where, as you put it, the AI models are looking across vast amounts of data. They're looking at everything. How do you do that well? So all of that technology factor plays into it. One final thing, and this is just about the mindset of the government right now because what you're talking about is a lot of exploration and a lot of experimentation that's needed. How would you describe sort of the federal approach to this? I mean, in fail fast is the motto of Silicon Valley but that's a lot harder to do in the government when lives are at stake. Well, yeah, and it's cautious to be fair. It's not only lives at stake but it's taxpayer dollars, right? We're not, these are, everybody's putting in there and we want to make sure that we're doing right. Now, to be fair, the government is looking at a fail fast prototype type models that do work with hackathons and competitions that really bring together public sector and private companies like SAIC and others to do different things that help with this technology explosion. So for example, we work with USDA, we did multiple hackathons for precision agriculture. That kind of work is, it helps understand what do we need to do with precision agriculture? What tools make sense? We go to, so we have something called our innovation factory where we've contracted out with multiple Silicon Valley so we bring that to us and we bring that to the government. That way the government is not precluded by like certain, some of the rules that they have but those type of things really help that public-private partnership, it has to happen. Just on that point real quick, I know we got a break but one of the things that you mentioned there is that this new generation kind of mindset. Talk about that dynamic because there seems to be a new generation, digital natives emerging into the workforce and forcing the change within the government, can you validate that or can you share your opinion on how that's impacting everyone? Absolutely, I mean since I joined government over God, now it's over 12 or 13 years ago and I left four years ago but we've been talking about this cliff that's coming up in the human resources side of the house where 35% of the top tier leadership is retiring. That's all getting replaced by new folks entering the market and all of these folks grew up in the iPhone era. None of these guys do anything that, they're all mobile, they're work anytime, anywhere. They're coming in with a very, very different, they're very, very different mindset, but very different mindset in how to make government work and that's a good thing. That kind of shake up is actually necessary as these folks grow into leadership positions, they're going to change how government works so we've got to be ready for it. Great, well Sanjay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely, thank you for having me. We'll have more from AWS Public Sector. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned.


Coming up on D T N S can arm survive without the man, you know, the man being in video. Also the IRS backs down from facial recognition and Leslie Jones demonstrates why copyright is broken. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 8th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood and I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty sir. We have a longer version of this show. If you'd like more of it, it's called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash D T N S. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane and Paul Boyer. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung will stream its February 9th unpacked event in the metaverse or if you want a less buzzy way of putting it, Samsung will show a 2D stream of its announcement in a virtual space called Samsung 837 X hosted by Decentraland. If that seems underwhelming to you, you can also explore a virtual version of Samsung's New York Experience Center, collect NFTs and play many games. That's kind of fun. Signal now lets you switch phone numbers without losing existing chats, groups and messages. You have to enter both your new and your old phone number, go through the usual registration process, but you can keep your history. Contacts will see a message in threads telling them that you changed your number. Starting in April of this year, Microsoft Office will block all macros for files downloaded from the internet by default. Right now, office shows you a banner warning about macros, but you can still click through to use them. Microsoft will also make this macro blocking default on all supported standalone versions of Office going back to office 2013. You can still unblock macros in document properties if you wish. Peloton co-founder John Foley is stepping down as CEO, still owns like 80% of the company. He'll become executive chairman, former Spotify and Netflix CFO, Barry McCarthy is going to step in and become Peloton's new CEO. The company also plans to cut 2800 jobs. It's about 20% of corporate positions. The cuts will not impact the instructor roster, though. Jess, a DT, they're all going to be fine. The independent oversight board of Metta now issued an opinion Tuesday, recommending that Facebook and Instagram tighten their restrictions on sharing home addresses. Facebook allows such information to be published without restriction if it's considered generally available, defined as published in five separate news outlets. The oversight board recommended removing this exemption and creating specific enforcement channels to prioritize reports of doxing. Metta is not bound by the recommendation, however. All right, let's talk about the big news. It's off. Ready your puns. Softbank stays armed. Nvidia lays down arm plans. We could go on. But the upshot is that Softbank announced Tuesday that its plans to sell arm to Nvidia have been canceled. And effective immediately, Renee Haas is going to step up from arms IP group to take over as CEO from Simon Seegers. Tech crunches, Frederick Laudanois pointed out that Haas interestingly used to work for Nvidia. He was GM of computing products earlier in his career. Anyway, Seegers is out arm has a new Haas. I mean, a new CEO and video CEO Jensen Wong promised to continue to partner closely with arm and said, quote, I expect arm to be the most important CPU architecture of the next decade. So you know, we may not own them, but vote of confidence. The deal was originally scheduled to close in March of this year. That would have been 18 months after it was first announced in November 2020. But they extended that deadline to September. And now they've canceled it before either one of those deadlines. Despite canceling the deal before those dates, Softbank is still going to keep the $1.25 billion breakup fee and video will have to pay him that Softbank says its new plan will be to take arm public with an IPO expected sometime in the next 12 months. That's interesting because arm has consistently said that it needed the merger with Nvidia or it would not have the resources to grow into new park markets and protocol.com reminds us specifically that Seegers, the departing CEO wrote, we contemplated an IPO but determined that the pressure to deliver short term revenue growth and profitability would suffocate our ability to invest, expand, move fast and innovate. But you know, he's quitting. So I guess that's all out. The new CEO Haas now says being a public company actually gives us access to capital should we need it. What do y'all think is going to happen with arm? This is this is all about data center and the AI and video is going to still be able to use all the arm designs. So they march forward. I mean, but but arms going to be out there on its own. Softbank is very clearly getting out of that business. I think that the 1.25 billion is a drop in the hat, but it's still 1.25 billion. That's going to help arm a little bit, but Nvidia is still going to use this technology to the extent that they were going to use it if they would have acquired the company.  There is a huge demand for it. So if not, if not Nvidia, I think they can probably do it on their own or there will be somebody else just as big as Nvidia that will want to swoop in and scoop them up in a year, 18 months time. Yeah, I mean, this whole Nvidia arm deal always struck me as a little bit odd because it seems like arm is better as its own public company on its own. This is technology that lots of companies want and use and will use in the future. So the whole sort of like, well, how will it change for everybody else once Nvidia owns this entire property? That's a that's moot now, like it's not happening. It always seemed to me like arm was better off figuring out who are the best partners for us? Not an exclusive partner, right? And Nvidia could certainly say, yeah, we'll go ahead and license, you know, arm technology as we have been in the past, but it always seemed like, well, that would change somehow. How will it change? And now it won't. It's always about, do you have enough cash to keep going, right? It's not about how you're doing now. It's about, do we have enough resources to be able to develop the next thing so that we don't end up like Intel where we're just drifting, drifting backwards because we're not developing new stuff. And that's what arm is afraid of. That's what they've been afraid of and Nvidia would have given them that cash. All the resistance was that's too much chip power in one place. But the fact of the matter is, Nvidia, even if they had the arm licenses are going to be moving into a world of data center chips that AMD and now Intel are catching up in. But AMD and Intel are well ahead of an AI, which everybody's making neural processors and arm isn't necessarily dominant in that. So I don't think it would have ended up being as much of a problem in dominance as it looks like now because conditions were going to change. Now the problem is, is arm going to have enough to continue to develop and stay ahead of the game and not fall behind in data center and AI and IoT and all those other things that it's developing in. And that's where I'm with you, Rob. I think we just end up seeing somebody else not going to be in video, but somebody else comes along after this IPO and snaps them up. But who? If not Nvidia, who? That's a good question. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. If you've got an idea, let us know. Or if you'd like to buy them.  Yeah. Well, folks, it looks like a lot of people were right about Apple's acquisition of MobyWave. That was back in 2020. A lot of people said, what are they going to do with this company? Turning into a payment system for iPhones. Apple announced a tap to pay feature for iPhones today, Tuesday, that'll let users accept Apple pay payments on an iPhone XS or newer. And XS is a few years old. I have one myself, but you know, you've got newer phones with a tap from another phone, a digital wallet, or a contactless credit card. Apple will launch this first with Stripe compatibility. Other payment platforms will be integrated later this year. We'd have a specific date for that. But later this year says the company and the feature will be open to developers to integrate their own apps. That's really important. This is not something that is built in natively to iOS. This is Apple saying, we're just going to let third party developers figure it out so that you don't have to buy some sort of hardware solution. The framework is in the OS, but then the functionality has to go in the apps, right? Exactly. So the first will come from Spotify. Shopify, I'm sorry. Definitely not Spotify. Whole different conversations. Shopify. That'll come this spring. Again, no specific date, but you figure we're in February. It's probably going to be pretty soon. That is in partnership with Stripe. So tap to pay will work with the Shopify point of sale app. That means with the Shopify app and a newer iPhone, you know, tennis or newer, you now have a cash register that you don't need any separate hardware for. And like I said, not native to iOS. So this is Apple finally allowing the NFC chip for use in tap to pay for third party platforms. And there's some speculation online of, you know, folks saying, well, this is how Apple gets around antitrust issues because it's not Apple, right? They're just allowing other companies to do their own thing with each other. And you can, you can feel all sorts of ways, isn't that any trust issue long working? If they're like, this is how they get around it by actually allowing open access. I would say so. Yeah, we don't have a solid date on whether. Well, we know other platforms will get this. This is going to be an iOS beta feature that has yet to be rolled out. But Shopify will be able to use the feature at first. And then later this year, others will will get the functionality. And there's some, there's some other details here. But I think, you know, my first reaction is like, hmm, this is great for so many small businesses. What large business is going to be like, yes, finally, we can take off our point of sale, you know, hardware that we paid so much money for however many years ago and now use every day. I don't see large businesses saying, let's just give everybody iPhones and let them take payments that way. So I'm with you on that. If they eventually move this over to iPads to where the iPad now can become your POS system and those things are mounted or you're able to walk around your establishment with it, maybe where I see this playing a lot with those small companies, small vendors, those who are current like, you know, your barbers, beauticians, you know, hairdressers, those type of, you know, service businesses. Someone coming out to, you know, a plumber coming out or something like that to where you can just take a payment right on his phone that he has with them or her. I see those types of businesses, you know, potentially flocking to this because they don't have to have another device. They can just use the thing that they already have to try to, you know, take payments and not have to worry about cash and those kind of things. Now, we don't know if or when the expansion will move outside the US. This is US only for now. One would think it would, but that's Apple seems to be rolling this out slowly. One of the other things I wanted to, you know, to bring up to the group is something that I saw quite a bit online where people said, well, this is Apple's square killer. So what, you know, what you're talking about at a barbershop, at a, you know, at a small business, Rob, this, the square dongle, or even a square point of sale hardware device, it's a little bit, you know, kind of hanging out on the, you know, at the front. Those were always options.  Now, I don't know if Apple and Square have some beef that, you know, we have yet to know about, but Square could 100% use this software solution just like any third-party application. But what is it due to Square's hardware business?  In Square's latest quarter, Learning's Square announced that it made a little over $1.2 billion. Pretty good. But of that total number, less than $44 million of that revenue came from selling actual payment terminals. And I'm wondering if a company, not only Square, but others, but, you know, mostly Square are kind of going like, okay, cool. We don't have to do the hardware anymore. It's just going to be built into a lot of phones using NFC. They definitely are. They're saying, thanks, Apple. Now, Square's going to still have to make hardware because there are a ton of people who are using Android phones that would want to still be able to use their, you know, their platform. But yeah, I don't see this as being a big issue to, you know, to someone like Square, so long as they can, from a software standpoint, use the services that Apple's going to be provided and actually makes things easier for them. This only becomes a Square killer if Square doesn't use it. Exactly. So I don't know if Square has some beef, like you said, but I would fully expect that Square just gets on board and integrates this and says, yeah, if you don't want to buy the hardware, great, we will still take a cut of your transaction. Sure. Anybody who equivalent of one payment penalty of Nvidia losing arm. So we want to keep that coming in.  But even Square users who say, oh, no, it's just not going to work in there. That's for sure not what we're saying. Not yet. That is all that is all still an option. Well, who knows why Apple partnered with Stripe first? But that does not to me immediately mean that Square and PayPal and anybody else won't won't jump on this as well. Right. All right, so let's talk a little bit about NBC and Leslie Jones and copyright. So so here's some facts you need to know to understand this next story. Comedian Leslie Jones says that she has loved the Olympics since she could walk and became famous for entertaining live 20 excuse me, live tweeting of many things, including the Olympics. Leslie Jones. Yes, she's very good at it. And, you know, Leslie Jones was not the first person alive to the Olympics, but she sure took it to another level with the extreme excitement and fanaticism she brings each of it. You have got to see some of these if you if you can still find them on. So she was employed by NBC for Olympic coverage back in 2016 and 2018, but she's not employed this year. Copyright law. And, you know, is in any U.S. is written or on the side of protecting rights for holders. And NBC is definitely a rights holder for the Olympic coverage because it has paid 7.75 billion for those rights through 2032. So OK, let's move on to the story. So some of Leslie Jones tweets about the Olympics were taken down for potential copyright violations because she occasionally includes shots of her TV with the Olympics actually running when she's doing her live tweeting Sunday night, Jones, you know, just about gave up writing. They block my videos and they get folks that think they can do it like me to do it. And I'm tired of fighting them. I love the athletes and they love me doing it. And I know y'all love it, but it's just gotten too hard and no one is fighting for or with me. So I guess I'll leave the leave this to the professionals. But thank you all for the love. Hashtag up to y'all now. Now, Tuesday, which is actually earlier today, NBC told Variety that posts were being taken down because of a third party air, which has been resolved. The NBC spokesperson said she is free to do her social media posts as she has done in the past. She is a super fan of the Olympics and we are a super fan of her. We're super fans of Leslie Jones, too. But is this the thing? Are we super fans of how copyright is actually working in this situation? So here's a couple things that I want to say about this. I think that the way that she was taken down is exactly the way that's supposed to happen. The problem or the air, in my opinion, was the NBC didn't give this lady a contract and actually pay her and give her clearance to put up these amazingly hilarious videos that she's been doing for free. So, you know, I think what's probably happened is that their third party company, anytime you find offending content, pull it down. That's actually happened and maybe there was an air that, unless it's Leslie Jones, don't pull hers now. But yeah, it's just like, you know what, NBC, you could have, you know, you could have avoided a lot of this, in my opinion, if they simply just paid her to do this because she's doing it on her own. It is promoting you.  So this is something that, you know, the air was probably not paying her to do this for you. Or was there really a third party error at all? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'm 97% sure I know what happened here because I've been the victim of it on our YouTube channel. There are companies that are contracted to just go and cast as wide a net as possible for stuff. And they just automatically send takedowns for that stuff, knowing that most people are not going to be able to fight it. And what the error was, is that third party company didn't have an exception for Leslie Jones account, build into that wide net. And NBC realized that and said, yeah, take her out, you know, tell your bot to ignore her account. We don't want to have out of bad take down against Leslie Jones. But boy was that too late. You know, all this kerfuffle before NBC was like, no, no, actually you're driving eyeballs to our content. And we want we want you to keep doing that Leslie Jones. I saw one of her tweets about the ice dancers that that were using Dove punk on Sunday. And I looked at it, I was like, if she's not getting paid for this, she going to get a takedown and then she did. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's the world we live in.  This it is it is pure comic gold. She is really, really good at doing these things. And I'm just, you know, NBC, get a hold of her people, get her a contract and remove well, you've already removed the barrier, but it's like she's free to use it. No, she's able to use it for free. No, pay this lady to do these live tweets because they are really, really good and are boosting your bottom line. I know it's from the heart with her. It really is. But she deserves she deserves it, right? She means earning it. Think about it. She was on contract. She was paid to do it in previous Olympics. She's still there for free. They brought her on set. Yeah, exactly. So no, she loves this. Well, folks, if we got you in a social mood now, you can get in touch with us on the socials daily tech news show on Twitter. That's Daily Tech News SH and DTS picks P I X on Instagram. Go give us a shout out. Tell us your following us. We'd love to hear from you and we'll be back in just a second. The US Internal Revenue Service, the good old IRS has decided not to use facial recognition from a company called ID me to authenticate people wanting to look at their tax records. The IRS trans will transition away from using ID me over the next few weeks. So if you've already had to go through that, you're done. But over the next few weeks, if you try to sign up, they'll stop using it. It will be replaced by an authentication system that does not involve facial recognition, though the IRS hadn't announced yet which one last time I looked. Now there are a lot of things to consider about this story. Remember, this isn't about filing taxes. This is for accessing special records, things like transcripts, requesting payment plans, other account information. You can still file without it. You can still get this stuff with a paper request too. This is just making it easier to get some of these things online. Records that need strong identity verification are the ones we're talking about. The IRS isn't the first to use ID me 30 states and 10 federal agencies already use ID me to screen for identity thieves that are applying for benefits in someone else's name. So IRS looked at this and said, Hey, 30 states and 10 federal agencies will use the same thing. Keep in mind ID me was not using facial recognition for logging in. This wasn't to get into your account. It was using it for account setup. This was meant to verify that you were the person who you said you were. Now at first glance, it might not seem as bad as it sounds ID me said it was using one to one facial recognition. That's like Apple's face ID. One to one is used when you have an actual image of the person and facial recognition is used to verify that the right person is being authenticated. One to many on the other hand is when you have a database of faces and you use facial recognition to figure out who is requesting authentication. That has more problems ID me was definitely using one to one for the identity verification. That is true. You uploaded a driver's license and a selfie and they were matched. If they failed to match, you got put on a video call with a human who would review it. That was actually where there were bigger problems was trying to wait for someone to do your review if it didn't match. Then reports came out that ID me also used one to many verification. And on January 26th ID me CEO noted that yes, it uses one to many verification to check on selfies to make sure a single attacker is not using multiple identities. It has an internal database. We've gotten these selfies. They're encrypted. We don't use them for anything else. But we're going to check to make sure somebody's not trying to sign up for multiple accounts. But they didn't make that clear from the start. The CEO said the company does not normally disclose methods used to fight identity theft because it reduces their effectiveness. That's their excuse for not making it clear from the start. And that led to another revelation. Bloomberg reports that ID me was using Amazon's recognition system. That's the one that has previously been criticized for not being accurate for people with darker skin color. Amazon says its current system is more accurate. than it used to be. And ID me told the Washington Post that its system is exceptionally accurate with incredibly small variation across demographic groups and skin color. However, that hasn't really been demonstrated. So the IRS has decided not to use ID me. After all, it's not clear what it's going to use instead. It might use login.gov. The federal government uses login.gov for 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies. That system is run by the General Services Administration, which is committed to not using facial recognition. However, login.gov does not meet some of the stronger security standards that the IRS was attempting to meet, including requiring some kind of biometric authentication. But I know you talked about this on the tech John a while back, Rob. It's it's it's not going to happen. Are you happy now? I am. And I have had many people say, well, you just understand what they're doing. This is not for you to log in every time. This is just for verification. I understand that what I need for you to understand is that when it comes to women of color in particular, black women in particular, facial recognition systems are tens of thousands of percent more inaccurate for them compared to their white counterpart. I did not miss speak tens of thousands, tens plural with an S. More times inaccurate. You know, because of that, I think that I don't want to use this because I'm putting my face into the system.  So the government already has it. The concern that I have is are they going to be able to accurately match your ID to what you look like when you are putting your phone in front of your face and just report after report paper after paper, you know, study after study shows that for dark skin people, this stuff just doesn't work all that great. That was my biggest concern. And then you can get to everybody is using ID. Me is saying this stuff is not it doesn't work that great. I have issues. It's not, you know, if it doesn't recognize me, I've got a call into a queue and it's hours before I can actually get into the system I was getting into when you're talking about people's paid, you know, they're not paid checks. But when you're talking about their income tax rate, you know, you know, stuff that you can't have someone waiting for hours trying to get an answer or trying to figure out what form they need to fill out. So they just need to do a better thing. They need to figure out something better than facial recognition because we're just not there yet for a large part of the population who have dark skin tone. Yeah, I was I was actually I was actually on board with ID. Me at the start, because I thought I first of all, I didn't think they were doing one to many at all. I don't love that they hit that I get the excuse why I also don't think the one to many is as bad as some people think because it was one to their own many. But your concerns and your description of them on the tech John really got me thinking because I'm like, well, OK, it's not about facial recognition being wrong. It's about facial recognition causing some people to have to wait longer for their service because that's when those reports from Krebs about this this failed for him. And he got shoveled to the front of the line.  And if it's not working for people with darker skin, that means people with darker skin are going to get authenticated slower than other people. And I'm not OK with that. I don't think anybody should. Well, if we'd like to talk about the future of neural networks, calling their company Hacker BCI, a PhD student and an artificial intelligence expert are teaming together and planning to sell some brain computer interfaces that they've they've made, giving the project the tagline from hackers to hackers. The website describes it this way. Hackers are creative problem solvers and will find something that others won't be able to find and think that the way others won't think. So BCI is if you're not familiar, means brain computer interface. It's a big deal, at least in theory.  But Hacker BCI doesn't seem to be doing anything along the lines of what Neuralink is doing. Neuralink is extremely expensive. You know, it's really off the table for for a lot of consumer folks, and it doesn't even seem to be targeting the medical community, either. A recent article on hackster.io describes as an entry level brain computer interface. Many of them that are affordable and easy to build designing an open source add on for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers to interface with electro and cephalophagraph sensors or the P I E E G. The company's paper says it cost about $350 for 24 electrodes. One would think $350 pretty cheap, but the Raspberry Pi community might say that sounds kind of expensive to us. So not exactly manipulating things with your mind, but would we buy it? I mean, it's not the first package of this that has been out there, but it's cool. Listen, hacker, I like that they're using hacker the way I try to use hacker on this show. It's an attacker. If you're doing something malicious, it's a hacker. If you're just trying to find a workaround, this is a way to hack together some mind control. Yeah, that's cool. Maybe a little pricey in the Raspberry Pi community, but still, it's a fun project. I like it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it, Mike, and what he says is oddly chilly Dubai, wrote in and said, he was kind of agreeing with Justin Robert Young's assessment that meta might be in trouble. That was from last Thursday's show. He says, regarding meta's bad earnings report, I'm starting to believe things might be looking bad. The youth tell me I'm an old whenever I tell them if they're on asked them if they're on Facebook. And as I tell them to get off my lawn, it's the best way I find to keep up with friends all over the world. Instagram mostly tells me what they had for them. However, over the last few months, I've all but abandoned the mobile app because the algorithm, at least for me says Mike, has gotten weird case in point when posting my word'll score this morning, which was three out of six. Congratulations, Mike. The top post that the app showed me was from a thread from July. More and more, the app prioritizes posts from days or weeks prior, including ones that I even saw when they originally posted that this is happening now effect lost on me. Mike says the web app is slightly better, but still its features are less robust. Other than the time I accidentally gave away the word. I won't say it just in case you're catching up on word'll, but it was a word on word'll after posting you next to my score because because of the word. My engagement has gone down. I see that amongst my friends as well. Mike says in conclusion, even if they do fix this algorithm glitch, I have no idea how they turn this around. The Facebook memories feature reminds me how good it used to be, and I have no faith that it will get back there. Yeah, more and more of these kind of reports, and they're all a little different. I'm not enjoying Facebook as much because dot dot dot.  I was like, I mean, I'm not going to tell you what to do.  Yeah, if you want to do that, more and more people are asking the questions. And if, you know, it's just a few here and a few there over time, the those fuse as a tool, you know, to a lot. So Yeah, then it becomes momentum. And then it becomes a problem for the company. Anyway, we want to thank a brand new boss. And that brand new boss today is Edwin. Edwin just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Edwin. We are so glad to have you. Yay, Edwin gets all the attention to himself today. That could be you tomorrow. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Absolutely. Also, big thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Rob, I know you're a very busy man. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Oh, well, it's always a pleasure being on DTNS. And folks can find me pretty much everywhere at at Rob Dunwood on whatever platform and also check out my other podcast SMR podcast dot com and the tech john dot com. Excellent. Well, we are live on the show Monday through Friday. You might be listening to us after the fact. But if you'd like to join us live, we'd love to have you for 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more at where you can do that at daily technique show dot com slash live. And we're back with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.