NSA’s China-focused ‘innovation pipeline’ targets economic imbalances

The National Security Agency has been slowly creating an “innovation pipeline” to pinpoint and fix U.S. vulnerabilities to China, and it’s starting with a new pilot program focused on economic security and emerging technologies, a senior intelligence official said.

“‘Red Ventures’ is meant to provide a single list, essentially, of challenge problems for our China mission, for a whole bunch of different innovation communities,” Dave Frederick, the NSA’s assistant deputy director for China, told reporters. “We've run a pilot…focused on the economic security topic because we knew that was going to be a shift for us.”

Frederick teased the program last year before the agency completed its classified China-focused strategy. The goal was to unify disparate initiatives that connect industry to the intelligence community. But things have not moved as quickly as they had hoped.

“A big part of the delay was just lining all this stuff up in time, and then how do we then crowdsource based on these problem sets, and then start to innovate?” he said. 

To address the “different pockets within the agency highlighting different innovation needs,” Frederick said the agency has been mapping the technology gaps between the United States and China, based on the classified China strategy. The pilot crowdsourced ideas from NSA employees on how to address economic vulnerabilities and technologies that could affect strategic advantage. 

“We've gotten through phase one of that. So we've curated a set of problems. We're now moving into phase two, where we're going to work with all the different solution organizations,” like In-Q-Tel, Frederick said. 

The goal is to expand the effort to address everything in the agency’s China strategy. 

“We're still piloting it, so we're running slower, but definitely think it's going to be very useful tradecraft for us to use in terms of prioritizing,” he said.