Reporting in the Crosshairs: Shane Harris on Politicized Intelligence, Press Freedom, and America’s Allies

0:00Something is changing in our country, and most people feel it before they can explain it. My guest today is Shane Harris, a national security journalist at the Atlantic and a former Washington Post National Security Reporter. Kane's known for deeply reported stories on intelligence, surveillance, and cyber conflict, and at the post he was a part of the team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Republic Service. He's also the author of two books on surveillance and cyber conflict, The Watchers and At War, and he's known for deeply reported stories that connect intelligence, tradecraft, to real-world consequences. In fact, he's one of those guys that somehow has sources inside that report stuff that even those of us in the national security, he plays space or like, wow, how do you know that? So Shane, welcome to the show. Good to see you, John. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. It's great to see you too. But I want to talk about your career and changes you witnessed in U.S. national security and also some recent events. But I think Americans are rightly focused on domestic economic issues now, but I think

1:03it's nonetheless important to show about what happens abroad and in our national security that will eventually impact us at home. So I want to get to some of that stuff, if you don't mind. That's great. Well, first of all, I know you spent several years at the Washington Post, your reporting was excellent. And like I said, often surprising to a former intelligence officer about just how much you uncovered. What is your take on what's happening at the post now and maybe the state of media and journalism related to foreign affairs in general? Yeah. Well, my big take on what's happening at the post is it's terribly sad. You know, I spent seven years there and worked with a lot of people who aren't there anymore either because they left, you know, a year or so ago, like I did, or they got they lost their jobs or they in the recent round of layoffs. You know, I said this publicly, I think that the sad truth about what's going on at the post is the people who've been in charge don't know how to run a newspaper. They just don't really seem to understand, you know, the business model of journalism

2:07in the year 2026, which I'm not saying that there's some obvious way to do this, but, you know, seems to me that they alienated a lot of their subscribers with things like canceling a presidential endorsement 11 days before the endorsement, which look, I'm in the category. People who don't think newspapers should be doing presidential endorsements either, but if you do it 11, if you cancel 11 days before an election, you're going to annoy some people and they lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers because of that, they're just never was really a plan for how to make money given all the great reporting that people were doing at the post. And, you know, the Wall Street Journal figured out how to do that, you know, at times figured out how to do that. My current employer has figured out how to do that. And I don't think that it's not the answer is, you know, unknowable, I just think that the people who were at the top really have did not make good decisions. And ultimately, Jeff Bezos is very distracted and is more interested, you know, in building rockets and competing with Elon Musk than, you know, running a newspaper.

3:09Well, does he even need to make money? I mean, the guys got so much money. He could run the Washington Post on his back pocket and not even realize where the money is going. So in a certain sense, if I was super rich and I was running some, I would just like say, hey, make this the best in the world if it cost me some money, fine, if it makes money great, but like, I don't get it. And that's exactly what people thought. I mean, when we were, when I was at the post, that's people, what people thought that he was intending, you know, there was a period where we were profitable, particularly, you know, during the first Trump administration where we had tons of readers and subscribers. I mean, that is the important difference between someone who just reads the paper and who actually pays for it. And not that, you know, you know, just because you have a billionaire owner, they should run a newspaper like a charity, but profit was never going to be the thing for him. I mean, it was, I mean, even in the days when newspapers made, you know, hefty, hefty profits, you know, decades ago, the post was never going to generate the kind of money that would matter to somebody as rich as him.

4:10So my question is, and I don't know that we know the answer to this, at what point did Bezos go from being a kind of benevolent owner who, as he said, wanted this to be his legacy and the thing that he looked back on when he was in his 90s, as what he was most proud of, to somebody who said, no, I actually need this thing to be more efficient and turn to profit. I think you can read in his very outward political overtures to the current administration, including Amazon buying, you know, the Melania documentary for $40 million, which would have gone a long way. And I'm wondering what the post is. How the hell the hell they're supposed to get out of the red? You know, I do think that there's something to this kind of rightward tilt of the editorial page and a kind of, you know, a gutting of the newsroom that's more interested in turning it into something that can be self-sustaining, which is great. But there's, again, the problem is there's no plan here. Like, I mean, at the end of the day, they said, we want to focus on politics and national

5:12security journalism, which that's great. Those are two things that I've spent my career writing about. But then how are you any different than, like, Politico? Why are you the Washington Post when you don't have a sports section, a local section? You don't have a foreign desk anymore. Tell her me skeptical that you can record on U.S. national security without having a foreign staff. I doesn't work that way. That's sad. That's one thing is for sure. So now you're at the Atlantic and you've written a number of excellent articles. And one recent one that I found really fascinating had to do with your potential brush with an Iranian spy in an article called They Killed My Source. Can you give the listeners a bit of background on this story and like, what ethical lines did you have to think about while you're pursuing that story? Yeah. This was one of the wilder stories in my career, which has had some pretty wild ones. So this actually goes all the way back to 2016 and I waited a long time to write about this for various reasons that we can talk about if you want, but back in 2016, a source of mine in the cyber security world alerted me to the fact that there had been a message

6:16posted on essentially like a bulletin board on the dark web that was known to be frequented by hacker groups and this person posting this message claimed to be part of an Iranian hacker collective, which was well known at the time and that they had information about the downing of the US stealth drone over Iran, which had taken place earlier. And in my experience, you know, I get emails from and texts from people fairly frequently that claim to know something about, you know, mysterious beings married in the desert or like the fillings in my teeth are talking to me, right? And then there's people who claim to know something that sounds a little bit more potentially real, but most of the time they turn out to really not know much anything at all. And it's those kind of inquiries that, you know, it's worth just firing an often email just to see if the person is completely full of it or not like, what is it cost you to cost you 30 seconds? So I wrote to this person and said, Hey, I heard you have this information, you claim to have information.

7:16Long story short, he gets back in touch a few days later and starts going through this whole protocol to like verify my identity as based on things that he must have researched online about my biography to kind of verify that I am who I am. And as I'm talking to him, I'm like, this case sure seems to be, you know, kind of professionalized about this. This is interesting. And what he told me was that he was an Iranian intelligence officer that he was part of essentially their cyber warfare unit, that it was his bath that had hacked the stealth drone and forced it to crash and that he had information about the regime's cyber activities that he wanted to leak to a reporter. And I'm kind of collapsing, you know, several days of conversation here, but he said he was a regime insider that his father was a senior intelligence person in the intelligence ministry.

8:17And he clearly had grudges against people in the bureaucracy and one had like revenge that he wanted to exact on people for reasons that were not entirely clear to me at the time by leaking on them. So he was sort of interested in burning the house down. And the course of this, he then told me that in addition to being an Iranian intelligence officer, he had also been an agent for the CIA. So he had spied for the Americans and that the relationship had ended not on great terms. I didn't know what that meant at the time. And that his hope was that in the course of leaking information to me that would then show up in news articles, the CIA would notice this. And at some point he was going to see if I would be willing to call the agency on his beat back and touch with them back and touch with them and say, hey, remember your boy, you broke up with him a while ago, he's got new stuff for you, he's got new stuff. Look, you're reading about it in the press.

9:20And if for all kinds of reasons, that sounded absolutely nuts. And it was like, you know, but the first part of, you know, I want to leak things to you that you can then go try to verify and report on that's what I do. That's that's that's exactly what my job is. So we talked for about two months in my intention was to gather information and eventually try and vet him, which I did, by the way, and determined that he wasn't that had been an asset for the agency, a pretty productive one and a good one, but a very hard to handle one who like to do things his own way. And I think that the risk-reward relationship here, which is a normal calculus when you're inside. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just so they cut him off. But you got to keep these people safe. Like if you have them and eventually they're going to get themselves caught, it's almost better, you know, sometimes they get rid of that intelligence because it's going to fall apart at some point. Well, and to your point, I mean, and I learned all this later, but he had gotten this himself caught after he had separated with the agency.

10:21He had been arrested. He had been suspected of leaking information to dissident groups in Iran. He had spent time in prison. I didn't know any of this. And I learned about this after he was killed while he was in touch with me. So on a day that we were supposed to have one of our regular online meetings and we met with these kind of encrypted communications, helping us. He didn't show up. And then I heard for a couple days later from a mutual contact that he had been killed at his apartment. And the story is kind of going back and piecing all of this together and figuring out, you know, why he was talking to me in the first place. What was really the nature of his relationship with the agency and one of the things I explore in the story is how the relationship that a reporter forms with a source, it becomes this extremely intimate relationship that is very similar to what your world was when you're developing sources as an intelligence officer.

11:23And one of the things I kind of grappled with in this story was a lot of the initial fear and guilt I had that had eyeed on something, did not keep him safe enough that he had got caught and people can kind of read the story and learn more about that. But from an ethical standpoint, it was a very challenging relationship because on the one hand, he was a source. On the other hand, he wanted to use me to get back in touch with his old handlers, which would have been, we never had to cross that bridge, but I don't think I would have been able to do that. Well, it's an incredible story and I would suggest that people read it, but it feels those kinds of things we dealt with in our work, but when I worked in CIA, I have like balancing security and safety and the information and somebody's ego and the trust. And so I think it's a great, great story. So I suggest people read us a little, let me move on a little bit to something more general about intelligence and national security. So obviously with this new Trump administration, there's been a lot of changes.

12:24And so, but let's talk, go back to what you've been doing this for the last 10, 15 years. What changes have you witnessed over the past 10 to 15 years? Essentially during the Trump era, because it seems like the Trump era is a stress test on our institutions. Yeah. How are they changing? And how does it affect who stays, who leaves, who rise, give us a sense of what's changed and what you've learned? You know, I used to say in the first Trump, it was the first Trump term, looking back on those four years that I spent that time not writing about the intelligence community, but about a president at war with the intelligence community. And it so often felt like the main story within these agencies was how they were trying to resist political influence by the president, how they were trying to, to some significant degree, defend themselves against his constant accusations that it was, you know, run by a deep state of people who were not loyal to him, who were manufacturing information to

13:28try and take him down. And that was just kind of, you know, a dominant theme of the coverage. And that was extraordinary because, I mean, you know, I came of age writing about the intelligence community after 9-11. And I, I mean, I, before, when I was like a 25 year old reporter and everything I knew about the CIA, it's seen in movies, which, you know, is totally accurate, right? But one of the things that was really impressed upon me very early on by people who were veteran intelligence officers was the way in which the community strives to function in a political manner. It doesn't mean it always succeeds, right? But that the default position should be that we are an organization that is here to serve the president and the decision makers, whoever they are, whatever the party, and that we do this as objective as possible, which resonated with me because that's kind of how we work as journalists. And that Trump wasn't seeing this and wasn't understanding it, or didn't believe it, just

14:34colored the entire relationship, I think, you know, and then layering a top of that, you know, that, you know, there were early on concerns that his campaign had been in touch with Russians. And like, I mean, people forget this, right? You don't. That the first year of his German office, I mean, he was actively under investigation by a special counsel to determine whether his campaign was coordinating with the Russians during the election. And, you know, which he loves to call the Russia hoax, you know, those were real targets for us as journalists, and that made us targets for a lot of his critics who thought that we were inventing this stuff. So, you know, then you get kind of to Biden, and things seem to kind of revert back to the norm, then, and, you know, and, you know, there were many success stories, I think, for the intelligence community in the Biden years, particularly, you know, their very accurate call about Putin's intentions to invade Russia, which was now practically four years ago

15:38to the day. And it just felt like the intelligence agencies were sort of getting back to the kind of normal position that they were always in when I covered them, which kind of made it a more normal story. And now we've sort of flipped back the way things were in Trump one, but what's really changed, and I think is really alarming to me, I mean, just as a citizen, is that in the first term, you had people in positions of authority and people leading all of these various national security agencies that I think generally, I mean, with some exceptions, but we're generally trying to, quote, do the right thing, right? And understood that the system was under tremendous strain, and in many instances, we're trying to kind of hold the line or resist the temptation, the president's impulses to really politicize these agencies. There is no one like that in positions of authority today. In fact, it is the opposite, I think, for almost exclusively with some notable exceptions,

16:40you have people running these agencies who very much believe in the mission of politicizing the agencies, turning them into instruments of politics and policy. Now they will not see it that way, but that is what they're doing. I mean, you do not have an independent FBI and Justice Department right now. The director of national intelligence appears to be spending most of her time trying to prove conspiracy theories to undermine American's confidence in the election. I presume so that when Republicans lose the house in nine months, the presidents of reporters will say the supporters will say the election is stolen. We have gone so far past the zone of even what a politicized intelligence community I thought would look like. Let me ask you a little bit. How is that impacting the workforce? So when I work to see I, yes, they bring in a new director, and in this case, they bring in incompetent partisan directors, Tulsi Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Ash Patel, or whatever.

17:42But in general, the workforce, everybody else there came from the bottom up, was trained, sees themselves as professionals. How is it impacting? I mean, I'm careful not to actually reach in the old friends and ask questions because I'd be putting them at risk, but that's sort of your job. Do you see that this is having impact on the work forces? What do you see is happening? Because there's a lot of news lately that Ratcliffe is saying, pulling all these old analytical reports because they're woke and Tulsi Gabbard is trying to say that the community was involved in in Russia hoax and all these kind of things. How is that impacting the workforce? What are you seeing as a reporter? I see morale being plummeting, people who've been in the agencies long enough to know that this is not how it normally works, questioning whether they should leave a lot of people leaving, people being fired, obviously, who won't go along with the program, as it were. People know this is messed up, they know this isn't normal, and whether they're Republicans,

18:45Democrats, and for the most part, they leave the politics at the door when they go to work every day. I think one thing I wonder is about young people who are in positions where they're just coming in right now, and this is the environment in which they're learning about how the intelligence community works, and are they going to presume this is always how it's been? It's a close system, and you are really inculcated in the traditions and the values by people above you. Now I have to imagine, to some degree, those people are saying to young people like this is not how it's always worked, but there are reports about loyalty tests for people coming into positions now in the national security agencies. Are they now screening only for MAGA people? This could have a long-term effect, and another way to measure this is in talking to American

19:49allies, particularly in the Five Eyes community. I talked to one member of that group who said to me, when Biden was elected in 2020, we thought, OK, Trump was the aberration in American politics, Biden now we're back to the norm. When Trump was reelected in 2024, this person said, now we realize Biden was the aberration, but the norm in your politics is that you are polarized, and whether it's the Canadians, the Brits, the Aussies, whoever, whoever, I think at the working level, those relationships are still pretty sound from what I can tell, and reasonable, but I think there is just now this presumption for our allies that our politics could vacillate between extreme hyper partisanship and something that looks more normal.

20:50By the way, if it does, enough that a Democrat is elected in two years, is that a guarantee that that person won't politicize the FBI and the CIA and the DNI, the way this administration has? Will they look at this and say, well, Trump got away with it, maybe I can do it too. We shouldn't just presume that because somebody is a Democrat, that they're just disposed to be a political institutionalist when it comes to this stuff, and I think our allies see that as well, and that makes them very nervous. As a reporter, though, does it make it hard or easier to report on the intelligence committee? Are there more people, maybe let me spread that out to the national security community? Are there more people willing to talk to reporters, to leak those type of things or less? It makes it easier for people, I think, who are disgruntled and afraid, like those people kind of come forward, which, you know, look, I mean, as a reporter, disgruntled

21:52government employees are often like really good sources of information, right? So in that sense, I think it is helpful in so far as people might feel more compelled to go to a reporter and say, somebody has to do something about this, or I have to tell someone about this. On the flip side, what's making it harder is that, you know, in a properly functioning intelligence community, it's not that the leadership are friendly with the press, but, you know, they realize that the press has a role to play as well in informing the public on foreign policy and the operations of government. And the best DNIs or CIA directors, in my experience, are the ones who have been willing to talk to reporters, to bring them in, to brief them, to put analysts in front of them, you know, often off the record or on background, but those folks who really did see the press as, you know, an organization institution that they needed to have a relationship with

22:52both to get their views across, but also because they understood that we play an important part in performing the public. In the current environment, you have leaders who view us as the enemy, I mean, who delight in, you know, slamming us on Twitter all day. And so, speaking for myself, that dialogue that used to occur between the press and the institution and the terms, through the leadership of those organizations, it's not there. Does it make it harder when people come to talk to you from inside, like, quote unquote, whistleblowers or what have you, because you have to then vet it, how do you develop trust with them? I don't know, because like in our world, when I was run trying to run sources, we were looking for people who had a clear motivation that we understood, that we understood where they were coming from, but also we wanted them to be sources for a long time. Like, I didn't want just someone to come up, dump something and then go away, right? How does that impact, like, what has changed for you since you started this work on their

23:55security and you're getting inside information compared to now? Is it different? Well, at a fundamental level, I think it is still the same in that you have to develop trust and you have to, you know, I often say that, like, the motive for the source is not the most important thing. It's the information that the source has. And on one level, that's true. Like, and if somebody comes to you with a claim, that seems like something you might be able to report, you have to go out and find independent sources to back that up. But then in a longer term relationship, right, as you say, the motive is important and you want to know, like, well, why is this person taking a risk and talking to me? Is it because they're a good government type and they think that things should be done a certain way and they're not, you, they just have a huge ego, you know, do they like spilling their guts to a reporter? And I think the most important thing that I found that you can do with a source is you just have to really actively listen to that person, that the act of listening is extremely

24:58powerful. People want to be heard. And if someone has made the decision to, you know, violate their security agreement and take the risk of talking to a reporter, what they really want is that reporter to take them seriously and to listen to them. So, you know, I mean, I do a lot of, you know, talking and writing in my work, but when I'm reporting for the most part, I'm just listening to people. And has it become harder now? I mean, I think what's actually making it harder now is probably that sources are even more afraid of, you know, what will happen to them if they're found to be talking to a reporter. And I want to make clear too that, like, I'm not, there are some people who are, like, many people who come talk to reporters and, you know, I'm no different, are telling you things that are not classified, like they might be talking about a school, they might be in Canada, but it doesn't mean that they're handing you a top-secret document, right? And, but even that is a risk because they're not supposed to be, if they're out, if they work in a job where they're not authorized to talk to a reporter, and they're people

25:59are being much caged here and much more careful because they fear the consequences of being seen as disloyal. This administration also, again, sees journalists as the enemy, they might come after you, they might start to use those government resources that they took more seriously in the past. FBI and others just started, like, okay, I want to know, Shane's clearly has sources. I'm going to start tapping Shane's phone, so I'm going to start listening and just, this has been something that, you know, has been an issue for years, but we've normally been protected from it. Are you more worried? Because you've written about the Iber and how big data is used in these surveillance techniques. How does that impact you? Is that changed the way you do business now? Is essentially the ways that people can contact the reporter, essentially, things that can be found out using law enforcement intelligence techniques, surveillance techniques? 100% I mean, the technology allows for the government to get much more precise and trying

27:00to figure out who might be talking. So, you know, we do all the things that, you know, one would expect of using good information and security protocols and all that, and I'll just going to leave it at that. But technology helps with that. The thing that worries me more now, though, is it's less, you know, can the government use its own really powerful surveillance apparatus to find out who reporters are talking to? It's more that the government is not abiding by the traditions of the past, which was to make it the norm, it was very, well, maybe back a sense, I mean, it used to be that the government, if they were investigating a leak, would consider the pinning, the phone records of a reporter as a kind of measure of last resort, and that's just not the case anymore. You know, a few months ago, the FBI served a search warrant on the home of Hannah Nateinson,

28:02you know, one of my former colleagues at the Washington Post and took her electronic devices. That is absolutely extraordinary. And in my conversations with people who have worked in the government and know how these leak investigations normally work, that is so far beyond anything that a Republican or a Democratic administration would have done in the past to actually serve a search warrant on a reporter's home. Which might strike some listeners as strange, because you think, well, wait a minute, like, you're getting classified information, of course, they're going to search your house. It just, we haven't done it that way because there is long been a tradition in the Justice Department and the intelligence community that we do not want to impede upon a functioning free press and that we don't criminalize journalism. We criminalize sources giving information to journalists, of course, but not the journalists themselves, publishing what they received. And so now we're in this zone where the government, I think, is very clearly, you know, has taken the gloves off.

29:02And that worries me even more than the technology and the capability they have to monitor communications. That's what authoritarian governments do abroad too. So I mean, we're clearly up this, among other things, we're moving in that direction. Let me ask you just into some of the issues of year covering of late. I know you've written about Greenland, Iran, there's a recent stuff with the Venezuelan talk a little bit about, you know, the kind of things that you're looking at now, you're worried about now, are there, are there under reported areas that are worth discussing? Well, what really is on my mind, I mean, as we're talking right now, obviously, is, you know, is the president going to order a military strike on Iran and by the time folks hear this, he may have. And it just in, you know, it's what's remarkable to me in this second term is how President Trump has so much of his attention on foreign affairs. And for somebody who, you know, notably ran for office talking about unnecessary foreign

30:04engagements and years long wars that wasted lives and treasure, he sure seems interested in using military force and the intelligence agencies to get involved in the metal and other countries affairs. So that's a big, big thing on my mind right now. I mean, if you look, Greenland is a really good example of another kind of meta story that I'm paying attention to this term, which is, you know, the dismantling of the post-World War II, you know, US-led Western Liberal Order, right? I mean, you know, the, the institutions that, you know, for the better part of the past eight decades that Americans were instrumental in building have kept, you know, hundreds of millions of people in the West, generally safe and quite prosperous. That's all coming apart and it's being deliberately taken apart by us, like we're, our government is doing that. And that is having just profound ripple effects throughout the world and particularly in

31:06Europe with our allies in Greenland was kind of this acute example of that where, you know, there was a week there where we were all watching and talking to sources and people including in Denmark and in Greenland and in NATO were not sure whether the president was just going to unilaterally declare that Greenland now belongs to the United States. And you had this extraordinary moment where the Prime Minister of Denmark gave an interview in which she said, you know, if the United States like forcibly tries to take Greenland, like puts troops in Greenland, which sounds preposterous because it's only like 50,000 people, that's the end of NATO. If you try and take the territory of a NATO member's state, I mean, that's the end. And this was really something we were all contemplating. And then Trump went off and had a meeting with Mark Rude of the Secretary General of NATO and came out and was like, oh, now we've reached a deal. It's good. It's all fine. And it's just, I mean, but that's sort of the world that we're living in where it is this kind of like traumatic whipsawing and it takes a huge effect on our allies and

32:10it roads trust. And it may continue and it is likely to continue. It'll absolutely continue. Like this is not a bug. This is the feature. And I just surprised he's spending so much time on international affairs while the economy is earning south. And I think he was elected to fix and he's not. I agree. I agree. The one thing I would, I would also say and I think you do this is I don't think previous presidents by no bomb of bush others have really communicated to the American people. Why that post-war way of the world and why these allies and why they're so important? How do they help Americans themselves? That's right. Those of us who worked there lived overseas and worked with allies and saw what they did, saw the value to American citizens, how they save American lives, how they build American economy, totally get it. But most Americans don't. So it made it easy, easier for Trump to just rip it apart or because there's people who just don't get it. And I think one of the jobs of president has communicated and previous presidents didn't communicate clearly enough. I believe.

33:11I totally agree with you. And it's almost, I don't want to say it's too late. But boy has, you know, have the Atlantisists in the United States politics really lost a lot of time here to try and make the case for like, why should we care about the security of European democracies and why does that matter to me? And the case I think is pretty clear is just that it's a few, you know, US elections are not one on foreign policy. And there's just been this just bedrock presumption that like, well, no, this is just how the way things work. And obviously, you know, so much has changed and globalization and trade and the rest of it. And I think you're right that presidents who have long believed in the strength of those alliances did not do a good job of explaining to people, I mean, Biden tried with this whole notion that he had of like, we need to articulate why foreign policy is domestic policy. And he was trying, I think, to make connections around the economy and, but he always felt very like, he didn't have the skill, he didn't have the skill and it all kind of felt

34:15like underbaked a little bit, it's like, yeah, you need to do a little more work and like give me some more concrete examples. And then I think he thought that, you know, the war in Ukraine would maybe provide an object less than for Americans of like, no, right, this is why this is important because high, the Russians, you know, they're trying to take over countries in Europe. And then you have a Republican party that is, you know, at the very least not willing to stand up for the proposition that no, we shouldn't have, you know, a Russian dictator trying to take over pre-Countries in Europe, which is just mind-boggling because I mean, I grew up, you know, Reagan kid, you know. And, you know, we don't have, the public doesn't, I think, broadly understand or appreciate why these alliances matter so much. And, you know, I think that our allies look at that and are now planning for a future in

35:17which they can't depend on us. And they would be crazy not to do that, frankly. They would be crazy not to start spending more of their GDP on defense and being prepared to go their own way because they can't depend on us politically, right? And I hope they do, but I also, just having lived overseas from Australia, I think there's still people want leadership, people want an America that's serious. They don't want China to be the leader of the free world, China in fact itself has benefited tremendously economically from US national security. So with that, you know, I don't, you've been really kind with your time and I don't want to take up much more of your time. So can you give us a sense of some of the issues you're working on now, how people can find your reporting, that type of thing before we sign off here? Yeah. So I mean, broadly, like I said, I'm interested in like, you know, the whole dismantling of the order, I continue to be deeply interested in, you know, what the intelligence agencies are doing with regards to trying to understand China, which is arguably one of the most important and hardest intelligence topics right now.

36:20How the world of technology is changing both what our intelligence agencies can do, but also the environments in which they operate. I mean, the degree to which AI and persistent surveillance changes everything about the nature of how people who do what you used to do go about trying to recruit human assets in these countries. And that this whole world is just kind of changing. And you know, these are the kinds of stories that interest me, right? Because I've always found that the intelligence agencies are this great kind of front line for what the big conflicts are in the world and what those fault lines really are because that's where they need to be in understanding them. So you can find me at the Atlantic, you can find me on Twitter at Shane Harris. I'm not tweeting a whole lot, but if I write something on Twitter out there, but that's probably the best way to find me these days. Well, very good. Well, I would suggest to our listeners that they should follow you. They're reporting as excellent. You have great sources, you have a great understanding of the territory.

37:20So thank you for spending some time with us. And, you know, I hope we will be able to talk again. I got to get you on my other podcast too. I would love that. Thanks, John. It's always great to see you in the talk. You thanks for having me. Great for talking to you too. So for those of you who have been listening, this is the steady state Sentinel. It's a product of the steady state, a group of former national security professionals committed to defending American democracy. And if you like it, please leave us a rating. It really helps with, to get new followers. And so thank you very much, everybody, and thank you, Shane. Thank you for listening to the steady state Sentinel podcast. You'll miss out on more insights and exposés from America's premier global security experts. Also subscribe to our sub-stack and substack.com slash at steady state one and follow our social media. And join us right here next week for another exciting edition. The steady state is a nonprofit organization working to sustain our democracy and national

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