FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Abstract: Nuclear war and climate change present the two most serious threats to global security since World War II. This talk shows that nuclear weapons research and climate science were historically connected in deep, sometimes intimate ways. Each developed its own knowledge infrastructure, including people, technical systems, and organizations, with surprising parallels and frequent exchanges across the classified/civilian divide. From the 1940s on, nuclear weapons research and climate science both relied heavily on computer models, used related physics and numerical methods, and shared human as well as technical resources. Radiocarbon from nuclear weapons tests contributed to understanding of the global carbon cycle, while fallout monitoring networks produced critical knowledge about the stratosphere. In the 1980s, the potential for “nuclear winter” — a war-induced climatic catastrophe — became a major political issue, but the groundwork for this concern had been laid long before.
This interplay not only continued, but became even more significant after the Cold War’s end, when the weapons labs’ expertise, equipment, and observing systems were partially repurposed. Several US national laboratories now play essential roles in climate and Earth system science. Among these roles are the Program on Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, based at Livermore and responsible for the important Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a major unifying force in climate modeling for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. The cyberinfrastructure underlying CMIP and similar projects must address mounting challenges related to data access controls, software support, and the security of huge data collections, while their institutional and human bases depend on ongoing national support. Crafting effective climate policy, I argue, will require understanding and rethinking the dynamics of these knowledge infrastructures for the present, rapidly evolving context.
About the Speaker: Paul Edwards is a Professor in the School of Information (SI) and the Dept. of History at the University of Michigan. SI is an interdisciplinary professional school focused on bringing people, information, and technology together in more valuable ways.
His research explores the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science. His current research focuses on knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene.
Dr. Edwards is co-editor (with Geoffrey C. Bowker) of the Infrastructures book series (MIT Press), and he serves on the editorial boards of Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries and Information & Culture: A Journal of History. His most recent book is A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).
Paul Edwards
Professor of Information and History
University of Michigan
It’s a quintessential Silicon Valley scene. A group of tech-savvy Stanford students are delivering a passionate pitch about a product they hope is going to change the world, while a room full of venture capitalists, angel investors and entrepreneurs peppers them with questions.
But there’s a twist. This Stanford classroom is also packed with decorated military veterans and active duty officers. And a group of analysts from the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring the proceedings live via an iPad propped up on a nearby desk.
These Stanford students aren’t just working on the latest “Uber for X” app. They’re searching for solutions to some of the toughest technological problems facing America’s military and intelligence agencies, as part of a new class called Hacking for Defense.
A student team briefs the class on a wearable sensor they're developing for an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs – a product they're pitching as "fitbit for America's divers."
“There’s no problems quite like the kind of problems that the defense establishment faces, so from an engineering standpoint, it has the most powerful ‘cool factor’ of anything in the world,” said Nitish Kulkarni, a senior in mechanical engineering.
Kulkarni’s team is working with an organization within the US Department of Defense to devise a system that will provide virtual assistance to Afghan and Iraqi coalition forces as they defuse deadly improvised explosive devices.
“At Stanford there’s a lot of opportunities for you to build things and go out and learn new stuff, but this was one of the first few opportunities I’ve seen where as a Stanford student and as an engineer, I can go and work on problems that will actually make a difference and save lives,” said Kulkarni.
A 21st century tech ROTC
That’s exactly the kind of “21st century tech ROTC” model of national service that Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor at Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, said he had in mind when he developed the class.
“The nation is facing a set of national security threats it’s never faced before, and Silicon Valley has not only the technology resources to help, but knows how to move at the speed that these threats are moving at,” said Blank.
MBA student Rachel Moore presents for Team Sentinel, which is working with the U.S. 7th Fleet to find better ways to analyze drone and satellite imagery.
The students’ primary mission will be to produce products that can help keep Americans and our allies safe, at home and abroad, according to Blank.
Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter, who helped create the class and co-teaches it with Blank, said the American military needs to find new ways to maintain its technological advantage on the battlefield.
“Groups like ISIS, al–Qaeda and other adversaries have access to cutting edge technologies and are aggressively using them to do us harm around the world,” said Felter, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
“The stakes are high – this is literally life and death for our young men and women deployed in harm’s way. We’re in a great position here at Stanford and in Silicon Valley to help make the connections and develop the common language needed to bring innovation into the process, in support of the Department of Defense and other government agencies’ missions.”
Startup guru Steve Blank shares a light moment with a group of students.
The class is an interdisciplinary mix of undergraduate and graduate students, from freshman to fifth year PhD student.
“It’s like a smorgasbord of all these people coming together from different parts and different schools of Stanford, and so I think that’s just a really cool environment to be in,” said Rachel Moore, a first-year MBA student.
Moore’s team includes electrical and mechanical engineering students, and they’re working together to develop a system to enable the Navy’s Pacific Fleet to automatically identify enemy ships using images from drones and satellites.
Tough technological challenges
Months before the course start date, class organizers asked U.S. military and intelligence organizations to identify some of their toughest technological challenges.
Class co-teacher Pete Newell throws his hands up to celebrate a student breakthrough.
U.S. Army Cyber Command wanted to know if emerging data mining, machine learning and data science capabilities could be used to understand, disrupt and counter adversaries' use of social media.
The Navy Special Warfare Group asked students to design wearable sensors for Navy SEALs, so they could monitor their physiological conditions in real-time during underwater missions.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were interested in software that could help identify accounts tied to malicious “catfishing” attempts from hackers trying to steal confidential information.
And those were just a few of the 24 problems submitted by 14 government agencies.
Developing Solutions
The class gives eight teams of four students 10 weeks to actively learn about the problem they are addressing from stake holders and end users most familiar with the problem and to iteratively develop possible solutions or a “minimum viable product,” using a modified version of Steve Blank’s “lean launchpad methodology,” which has become a revered how-to guide among the Silicon Valley startup community.
Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, tries on a military-grade dry suit on a visit to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field.
A key tenet of Blank’s methodology is what he calls the “customer discovery process.”
“If you’re not crawling in the dirt with these guys, then you don’t understand their problem,” Blank told the class.
One student team, which was working on real-time biofeedback sensors and geo-location devices for an elite team of Navy SEALS (a project they were initially pitching at “fitbit for America’s divers”), earned a round of applause from the class when they showed a slide featuring photos from a field trip they took to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field to find out what it felt like to wear a military-grade dry suit.
Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, said the experience of squeezing into the tight suit and wearing the heavy dive gear gave her a better appreciation for the physical demands that Navy SEALs have to deal with during a mission.
“They’re diving down to like 200 feet for up to six to eight hours…and during that time they can’t eat, they can’t hydrate, they’re physically exerting a lot, because they’re swimming miles and miles and miles at depth and they can’t see and they can’t talk to each other,” Olney said.
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“It’s probably one of the most extreme things that humans do right now.”
Another group came in for some heavy criticism from the teaching team for failing to identify and interview enough end users.
But the next week, they were back in front of the class showing a video from a team member’s visit to an Air Force base in Fresno, where he logged some time inside the 90-pound bomb suit that explosive ordinance disposal units wear in the field.
“You can’t address a customer issue unless and until you really step into the shoes of the customer,” said Gaurav Sharma, who’s a student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
“That was the exact reason why I went to Fresno and wore the bomb suit, to get into the shoes of the end customer.”
Navigating the defense bureaucracy
Active duty military officers from CISAC’s Senior Military Fellows program and the Hoover Institution’s National Security Affairs Fellows program act as military liaisons for the class and help students navigate the complex defense bureaucracy.
“[The students] have really just jumped in with both feet and immersed themselves in this Department of Defense world that for so many civilians is just very foreign to them,” said U.S. Army Colonel John Cogbill, who has spent the last year as a senior military fellow at CISAC.
“I think they will come away from this experience with a much better appreciation of what we do inside the Department of Defense and Intelligence community, and where there are opportunities for helping us do our jobs better.”
Cogbill said he hoped that some of the inventions from the class, like an autonomous drone designed to improve situational awareness for Special Forces teams, could help the troops on his next combat deployment, where he will serve as the Deputy Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment.
“It’s not just about making them more lethal, it’s also about how to keep them alive on the battlefield,” said Cogbill.
Students also get support from their project sponsors and personnel at the newly established Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) stationed at Moffett Field.
Tech saves lives on the battlefield
Another key member of the teaching team is Pete Newell, who was awarded the Silver Star Medal (America’s third-highest military combat decoration), for leading a U.S. Army battalion into the Battle of Fallujah, where he survived an ambush and left the protection of his armored vehicle in an attempt to save a mortally wounded officer.
Class co-teacher and Silver Star Medal recipient Pete Newell explains some of the classic reasons why military products fail in the field.
Newell said he saw first-hand the difference that technology can make on the battlefield in his next job, when he served as director of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, which was tasked with creating technological solutions to the troops fighting in Afghanistan.
“What I realized is that the guys on the front edge of the battlefield who were actually fighting the fight, don’t have time to figure out what the problem is that they have to solve,” Newell said.
“They’re so involved in just surviving day to day, that they really don’t have time to step back from it and see those problems coming, and what they needed was somebody to look over their shoulder and look a little deeper and anticipate their needs.”
One of the first and most urgent problems Newell faced on the job was responding to the sudden spike in IED attacks on dismounted infantry.
The Army was still using metal detector technology from the ‘50s to find mines, but the new breed of IEDs, which were often hidden inside buried milk jugs, were virtually undetectable to the outdated technology.
Former U.S. Army Colonel Pete Newell demystifies some military jargon for the class.
“They could create an improvised explosive device and a pressure plate trigger…by using almost zero metal content,” Newell said. “It was almost impossible to find.”
Newell’s solution was a handheld gradiometer, the kind of technology used to find small wires in your backyard during a construction project, paired with a ground penetrating radar that can see objects underground.
But by the time the new technology reached troops in the field last summer, more than 4,000 had been wounded or killed in IED attacks.
Newell said he hoped the class would help get life-saving technology deployed throughout the military faster.
“I think it’s important to enable this younger generation of technologists to actually connect with some of the national security issues we face and give them an opportunity to take part in making the world a safer place,” Newell said.
Tom Byers, an entrepreneurship professor in Management Science and Engineering and faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, rounds out the teaching team and brings his experience in innovation education and entrepreneurship to the classroom.
Inspiring the next generation
Students said the opportunity to find solutions to consequential problems was their primary inspiration for joining the class.
“When I first came to Stanford, the hype around entrepreneurship was very much around, ‘go out, make an app, do something really fun and cool, and get rich’,” said Darren Hau, a junior in Electrical Engineering.
Students share a laugh during a class break.
“In Hacking for Defense, I think you’re seeing a lot of people bring that same entrepreneurial mindset into a problem statement that seems a lot more impactful.”
Felter said he was humbled that so many students were willing to serve in this way.
“It’s encouraging to find out that students at one of our top universities are very interested and highly motivated to work very hard and use their skills and expertise and talent and focus it on these pressing national security problems,” said Felter.
The teaching team said they planned on expanding their class to other universities across the country in the coming years, to create a kind of open source network for solving unclassified national security problems.
For military officers like Cogbill, who will likely soon be leading U.S. soldiers into combat, that’s welcome news.
“Every time you run a course, that’s eight more problems,” Cogbill said.
“If this scales across 10, 20, 30, 40 more universities, you can imagine how many more problems can be solved, and how many more lives can potentially be saved.”
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Influential startup educator Steve Blank (center) gives advice to Stanford students working on tough national security problems, while retired U.S. Army Colonels and class co-teachers Joe Felter (right) and Pete Newell (left) listen in.
Abstract: In 2004, al-Qaeda’s security chief smuggled 42 handwritten pages out of Iran, where he was confined under a loose form of house arrest. The notes written by Sayf al-Adl were each folded into a bundle the size of a cigarette, and they included two seminal documents: a history of ISIS Godfather Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's original engagement with al-Qaeda in 2000, and a high-level plan to re-establish the Caliphate between 2013 and 2016.
Al-Adl’s history has formed the basis of virtually every subsequent retelling of the development of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State. But none other than Osama bin Laden himself has repudiated al-Adl’s history, and newly available al-Qaeda correspondence from the period suggests that intra-jihadi competition drove al-Qaeda’s original engagement with Zarqawi more than strategic or ideological alignment.
Al-Adl’s other document, a seven-stage ‘Master Plan’ that foretold the declaration of the Caliphate in 2014, has proved extraordinarily prescient. It aimed to exploit a geopolitical loophole to al-Qaeda’s basic worldview and finally unify Zarqawi’s movement with al-Qaeda. The strategic vision proved powerful, but the alliance it was built for was not.
About the Speaker: Brian Fishman is a Counterterrorism Research Fellow with the International Security Program at New America, a Washington, DC think tank and a Fellow with the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, where he previously served as the Director of Research. He currently manages policy at Facebook regarding terrorism and violent extremism. Fishman also served as an assistant professor in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences. Fishman built and led Palantir Technologies’ Disaster Relief and Crisis Response team, which brought some of the world’s most sophisticated technology to humanitarian organizations. Fishman is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a founding editor of the CTC Sentinel.
Fishman is the author of numerous studies U.S. national security, terrorism and international jihadi groups. He has specialized in the so-called Islamic State and its predecessors since 2005 and taught a dedicated course about the Islamic State of Iraq in 2008. Fishman coauthored seminal investigations of al-Qaeda's foreign fighters in Iraq and Iranian support for Shia militias fighting U.S. troops in Iraq. Fault Lines in Global Jihad: Organizational, Strategic, and Ideological Fissures, a volume Fishman co-edited with Assaf Moghadam, was named one of the top books for understanding terrorist recruitment. He regularly appears in domestic and international media regarding terrorism and national security issues.
Fishman has taught as an adjunct professor in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Before joining the CTC, Fishman was the Foreign Affairs/Defense Legislative Assistant for Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. Fishman holds a Masters in International Affairs (MIA) from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Counterterrorism Research Fellow, International Security Program
New America
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Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to deal with the problem of overcommitment abroad. How does his record compare with earlier cases? Can the past help us understand the foreign policy debate of 2016? Can it tell us how, when—and whether—today’s retrenchment will end?
Stephen Sestanovich is a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf 2014).
From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. In previous government assignments, he was senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He has also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Event co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Please join us for the upcoming Payne Distinguished Lecture, “NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT," with R. Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The lecture will take place on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall. Please RSVP to Scott Nelson at snelson@stanford.edu.
Abstract: Dr. Goodwin’s presentation will discuss some of the rapid developments in additive manufacturing technology (3-D printing with metals and other materials) and their relationship to high performance computing. His will then address issues concerning the potential impacts of these technologies to include the US nuclear enterprise, nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation, and terrorism.
About the Speaker: Dr. Bruce Goodwin, Associate Director-at-Large for National Security Policy and Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is responsible for policy research and liaison with the US military, US government, and non-governmental organizations. He previously was the Principal Associate Director in charge of the nuclear weapons program at LLNL for twelve years.
Bruce Goodwin
Associate Director-at-Large for National Security Policy and Research
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Abstract: The conventional wisdom about current space dynamics paints a picture of a rising China, a resurgent Russia, and a drifting United States. It also argues that international governance mechanisms in space are failing and not worth U.S. efforts to repair. Thus, it suggests that nationalist and protectionist responses are the best policy directions for the United States. This presentation posits that both arguments are wrong. First, it makes the case that as 21st century space power shifts toward the commercial sector, the United States is well suited to compete with its rivals through innovation, international engagement, and network-building in space. Such efforts are more likely to succeed under emerging conditions in space than traditional, state-led efforts. Second, it argues that the possible breakdown of international space governance mechanisms poses a serious threat to American interests and will require the attention of both the U.S. government and the expanding commercial space sector.
About the Speaker: James Clay Moltz holds a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs (NSA) and in the Space Systems Academic Group at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. He also serves as the NSA Department’s Associate Chairman for Research and directs the DTRA-funded Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, based at NPS. He is the author of the recent books Crowded Orbits: Conflict and Cooperation in Space (Columbia University Press, 2014), Asia’s Space Race: National Motivations, Regional Rivalries, and International Risks (Columbia University Press, 2012), and The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests (Stanford University Press, 2008 and 2011 editions). Prof. Moltz holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. and B.A. (with Distinction) from Stanford University. He has served as an advisor to the NASA-Ames Research Center and to the U.S. Department of Energy and has provided expert testimony on space issues before the U.S. Congress. His commentary on space topics has appeared in such periodicals as Aviation Week and Space Technology, Nature, and the New York Times. At NPS, his honors include the 2015 Carl E. and Jesse W. Menneken Award for Excellence in Scientific Research and Sustained Contribution to the Navy and the Defense Department and the 2010 Richard W. Hamming Award for Interdisciplinary Achievement.
James Clay Moltz
Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs (NSA) and in the Space Systems Academic Group
Naval Postgraduate School
Jamil N. Jaffer is the Founder and Executive Director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University where he also serves as an Assistant Professor of Law, Director of the National Security Law and Policy Program, Director of the Cyber, Intelligence, and National Security LL.M. Program, and runs the NSI Cyber & Tech Center. Jamil also teaches classes on artificial intelligence, counterterrorism, intelligence, surveillance, cybersecurity, and other national security matters, as well as a summer course held abroad with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Jamil was recently appointed to serve as a member of the Cyber Safety Review Board at the Department of Homeland Security as well as to the Governor’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Jamil is also affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and previously served as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2016 to 2019.
Jamil is also a Venture Partner and Strategic Advisor with Paladin Capital Group, where he assists the firm with investments across the full range of its themes and theses, including a focus on dual-use national security technologies. Jamil also serves on the board of directors of RangeForce, an interactive cybersecurity team training and upskilling startup, and Tozny, a digital identity startup, as well as on the advisory boards of U.S. Strategic Metals, North America’s largest primary producer of cobalt, a critical mineral used in EV batteries, aerospace, and other national security applications; and Constella Intelligence, a deep and dark web intelligence startup. Jamil also serves as an advisor to Beacon Global Strategies, a strategic advisory firm, and Duco, a technology platform startup that connects corporations with geopolitical and international business experts. Jamil is also the managing director of Trigraph Caveat Capital, a private investment firm.
Among other things, Jamil currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Tech Innovation and previously was a member of the Center for a New American Security’s Artificial Intelligence and National Security Task Force from 2018 to 2023 and the CNAS Digital Freedom Forum from 2019 to 2022. Jamil is also a member of the Board of Directors of Speech First, the Advisory Board of the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, the Executive Committee of the International Law and National Security Practice Group of the Federalist Society.
Immediately prior to his current positions, from 2015-2021, Jamil served as a senior business leader at IronNet Cybersecurity, helping take the company from a bootstrapped first-year technology products startup through two rounds of venture capital fundraising, growing from approximately 30 employees to over 300, and through its listing on New York Stock Exchange. In his role as IronNet's Senior Vice President for Strategy, Partnerships & Corporate Development, Jamil worked directly for the co-CEOs of the company, Gen (ret.) Keith B. Alexander, the former Director of the National Security Agency and Founding Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Bill Welch, the former COO of Zscaler and Duo; in that role, Jamil led all of the company’s strategic and technology partnership efforts, including developing go-to-market and technology integration plans with some of the largest cloud platforms and cybersecurity companies in the market, evaluating potential acquisition targets, and developing overall corporate strategy and thought leadership around collective security and collaborative defense in the cyber arena.
Prior to his time at IronNet, Jamil served on the leadership team of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as Chief Counsel and Senior Advisor under Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN), where he worked on key national security and foreign policy issues, including leading the drafting of the proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS in 2014 and 2015, the AUMF against Syria in 2013, and revisions to the 9/11 AUMF against al Qaeda. Jamil was also the lead architect of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act and two sanctions laws against Russia for its first intervention in Ukraine.
Prior to joining SFRC, Jamil served as Senior Counsel to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence under Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) where he led the committee’s oversight of NSA surveillance, NRO intelligence issues, and NGA analytic and collection matters, as well as intelligence community-wide counterterrorism issues. Jamil was also the lead architect of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the nation’s first cyber threat intelligence sharing legislation that was signed into law in 2015.
In the Bush Administration, Jamil served in the White House as an Associate Counsel to the President, handling Defense Department, State Department, and intelligence community matters, and serving as one of the White House Counsel’s primary representatives to the National Security Council Deputies Committee.
Prior to the White House, Jamil served on the leadership team of the Justice Department’s National Security Division as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, where he focused on counterterrorism and intelligence matters. At NSD, Jamil helped lead the division’s work on In re: Directives, the first ever two-party litigated matter in the FISA Court and the second case before the FISA Court of Review in its 30-year history. Jamil also led NSD’s efforts on the President’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), including the drafting of NSPD-54/HSPD-23, and related classified matters, and advised the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command’s predecessor organization, the Joint Function Component Command for Network Warfare (JFCC-NW), on matters related to cyber intelligence collection and offensive cyber activities. For his work on these matters, Jamil was awarded the Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Special Initiative and was among the group of lawyers awarded the Director of National Intelligence’s 2008 Legal Award (Team of the Year – Cyber Legal).
Jamil also served in other positions in the Justice Department, including in the Office of Legal Policy, where he worked on the confirmations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to the United States Supreme Court.
Jamil also served as a lawyer in private practice at Kellogg Huber, a Washington, DC-based litigation boutique, as a policy advisor to Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and as a staff member or senior advisor on a number of political campaigns, including two presidential campaigns and a presidential transition team. While in law school, Jamil was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review, managing editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law, and National Symposium Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Following law school, Jamil served as a law clerk to Judge Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and, later in his career, as a law clerk to then-Judge Neil M. Gorsuch when he first joined the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit as well as a law clerk to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch when he joined the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jamil has published multiple op-eds and academic articles on national security, foreign policy, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, encryption, and intelligence matters, and is the co-author of a book chapter with former NSA Director Gen. (Ret.) Keith B. Alexander on national security and the press in National Security, Leaks, and the Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On (2021) and a book chapter with former CIA Director Gen. (ret.) Mike Hayden on ISIS, al Qaeda, and other international terrorist groups in Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World (2015). Jamil has also written book chapters on cybersecurity and surveillance, as well as op-eds and policy papers with former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olsen, and Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL), among others.
Jamil previously taught graduate-level courses in intelligence law and policy at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the National Intelligence University, served an outside advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and has recently testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the Israel-Hamas conflict, China, software supply chains, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and other national security matters. Jamil has also recently appeared on a range of national television and radio outlets including CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC, Bloomberg, PBS, Voice of America, and National Public Radio, and in various print and online publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post on a range of national security matters including cybersecurity, counterterrorism, surveillance, encryption, privacy, and foreign policy issues.
Jamil holds degrees from UCLA (B.A., cum laude), the University of Chicago Law School (J.D., with honors), and the United States Naval War College (M.A., with distinction).
Founder & Executive Director, National Security Institute; Assistant Professor of Law & Director, National Security Law & Policy Program, George Mason University Law School.
Stanford foreign policy experts discussed flashpoints around the world at an OpenXChange event this week.
Three of Stanford's most seasoned international affairs experts discussed foreign policy and diplomacy – and practiced a bit of it on stage, too – as they tackled the topics of refugees, Russia and other politically thorny issues at a campus forum March 1.
The event, "When the World Is Aflame," featured Condoleezza Rice, a Stanford political science professor and former U.S. secretary of state; Michael McFaul, director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and former U.S. ambassador to Russia; and Jeremy Weinstein, a Stanford political science professor and former director for the National Security Council.
Janine Zacharia, a Stanford visiting lecturer in communication and former Jerusalem bureau chief and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, was the moderator.
The event was hosted by OpenXChange, a campus initiative to provide a forum for students and community members to focus on today's societal challenges.
"So you were resetting some of my policy?" Rice half-jokingly interjected, as McFaul discussed the objectives behind the U.S. trade talks with Russia a few years ago.
"It was not about making friends with the Russians – I want to make that clear," McFaul continued after the laughter in the audience died down. "And it wasn't that we needed to correct the wrongs from the previous period," he said, casting a quick glance over at Rice. "The Russians had an interest in giving the Iranians a nuclear weapon. Our answer was, no, and let's work with them to prevent that."
A series of trade sanctions with Russia were eventually accomplished, but as it turns out, McFaul noted, the political environment has since changed with Russia's aggression in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.
Today's conflict in Syria was laid about four years ago, the panelists agreed, when the United States decided to aid the rebels and not overtly attack the current regime.
"There were reasons our president and others did not go down that path, but it was an invitation to others to play games in that environment," Weinstein said. "What their endgame is, we don't know."
Rice added that Russian President Vladimir Putin "does not mind countries that basically don't function." As such, "a stable, functioning Syria was never his definition of success."
Zacharia asked, "Are you saying we have yielded the endgame to the Russians in Syria? There is nothing we can do? And we're playing defense?"
"Yes," Rice answered.
"Wait, there is no endgame," McFaul said. "It's not that we yielded the endgame."
"Right," Rice replied.
Though the panelists' opinions differed at times, the trio of political science professors agreed on many points, including that international order is being tested, and that the refugee crisis is an overwhelming problem – one that the United States should help resolve.
"I'm a firm believer that America has a moral obligation to take [refugees]," Rice said. "But let's remember that we have to have a way to take them that is actually going to work within the system."
"We have a humanitarian architecture that simply isn't up to the task," Weinstein said. Securing congressional funding to reform the system will be a challenge.
What's more problematic, McFaul added, is that the current political rhetoric about how the United States should handle refugees is "based on fear."
"We're not having a rational debate about this in my opinion," McFaul said. "We have to fill the debate with empirical facts instead."
Public fears will continue as long as extreme Islamic State terrorist groups remain influential, "inspiring lone wolves like [those] in San Bernardino," Rice said, referring to the December 2015 terrorist attack there that killed 14 and injured 22 people.
"Somebody has got to defeat ISIS in its crib," Rice said. "They march in columns; they don't hide in caves like al-Qaeda. If CBS News can find them, then the American military can find them."
The tougher challenge, however, will be the task of influencing sectarian politics and creating a more stable state in the long term, Weinstein said.
Stanford – with its cache of expertise – should strive to shape the national dialogue with concrete facts and analyses, McFaul said. Inspiring students and giving them the foundational tools to become the new generation of policy leaders is also part of that, he said. Adding a course on Russian politics would also be an improvement, he said.
Weinstein is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Rice, a former Stanford provost, is the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The panelists urged students to gain a deep knowledge of the areas and issues they care about.
"Know your facts," Rice emphasized.
"When you're making policy decisions at the table, the people who understand these places and understand the political dynamics – those are the people whose voices are second to none around the table," Weinstein said.
"And we need to get you prepared for that in a more robust way," McFaul said, inviting students to pass any ideas about this to him.
In terms of career choices, "there's nothing greater" than public service, he said. "Sometimes I would get goose pimples when I could stand in front of Russians with the American flag behind me, representing the United States of America."
- This event is jointly sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) -
Five years to the day after a massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami caused an accident at three of the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, a panel of Stanford experts will convene in Encina Hall to reflect on the lessons learned from the disaster that unfolded starting on March 11, 2011. Panelists will include:
Steven Chu, 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy (2009-2013), Laureate of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology in the Medical School at Stanford University - Focus: Perspective from the Department of Energy on the role of the department in helping mitigate the consequences and the lessons learned
Phillip Lipscy, Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University - Focus: Fukushima in comparative perspective and how the Japanese nuclear power industry has reacted since the accident.
Scott Sagan, Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Focus: the effects of the accident on efforts to improve nuclear safety and security, based on the upcoming book Learning from a Disaster.
Takeo Hoshi, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of APARC's Japan Program, will chair the session and act as moderator.
This event will also serve as a book launch for the book Learning from A Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security After Fukushima, co-edited by Edward Blandford, a former Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC and Scott Sagan. the book is being published by Stanford University Press and will be available for purchase at the event. Pre-orders can be taken here.
A student team briefs the class on a wearable sensor they're developing for an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs – a product they're pitching as "fitbit for America's divers."
MBA student Rachel Moore presents for Team Sentinel, which is working with the U.S. 7th Fleet to find better ways to analyze drone and satellite imagery.
Startup guru Steve Blank shares a light moment with a group of students.
Class co-teacher Pete Newell throws his hands up to celebrate a student breakthrough.
Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, tries on a military-grade dry suit on a visit to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field.
“[The students] have really just jumped in with both feet and immersed themselves in this Department of Defense world that for so many civilians is just very foreign to them,” said U.S. Army Colonel 
Class co-teacher and Silver Star Medal recipient Pete Newell explains some of the classic reasons why military products fail in the field.
Former U.S. Army Colonel Pete Newell demystifies some military jargon for the class.
Students share a laugh during a class break.
