STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Phil Mudd has been listening to Ryan with us. Mr. Mudd served as deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center (ph) and also deputy director of the FBI National Security Branch. Welcome to the program, sir.
PHIL MUDD: Thank you.
INSKEEP: What do you make of the assertion that the FBI received no new evidence, just had better analysis of whatever evidence they had?
MUDD: Boy, this is a new-world story with an old-world answer. That is, in the days when everybody's talking about AI and jobs being replaced by AI, you bring in a different set of people, and a human brain can ask a different set of questions. Sometimes when you're working on a case for years, you get tunnel vision. Remember, back to the anthrax case, initially, back in the early 2000s after 9/11, people thought at the FBI - there was an initial suspicion around a scientist. The team changed on that investigation, and the investigation turned as a result. So my point is, you can look at data all day long, but when you bring in a different mind that looks at it a different way, sometimes you get different answers, and that might've happened in this case.
INSKEEP: So you're thinking this is like one of those TV programs where somebody comes upon a cold case and just thinks about it differently?
MUDD: I wouldn't call this a cold case because I've heard that term...
INSKEEP: Sure.
MUDD: ...In the past few days, but the prominence of this case means that people were looking at it over the years. So I think that asking different questions is an important part of why the case cracked. But I would also add, in the age of AI, looking at this amount of data...
INSKEEP: Yes.
MUDD: ...Is very, very difficult. You're talking about phone data. You're talking about purchases from big-box stores of things like endcaps. You're talking about license plate readers - aggregating thousands - tens of thousands of bits of data - has also accelerated in the past few years. And I suspect that helped as well.
INSKEEP: That is a thing that I wondered about because I'm aware that national security agencies work with companies such as Palantir. I haven't heard their names specifically in this case, but they're all about more and more advanced data analysis. And my first guess was that that's what's different from five years ago, is that it is easier to analyze this data more thoroughly.
MUDD: You are the first person to ask that question. I think that is what was missing in the press conference. There was a lot of conversation about nothing new came to the table. Think of how much we've talked about a digital data acquisition and sort of analysis in the last five years and how much it's changed. Even in the past, say, 24 months, 12 months, the conversations about how basic jobs will be replaced by AI. My point is, I suspect - I don't know, but I suspect over the past five years - the duration of this investigation - that the ability to massage huge amounts of data changed. And so even though there're humans asking different questions, their ability to get a rapid response really changes when you have that kind of data analysis...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
MUDD: ...At your fingertips.
INSKEEP: Now, let's talk about the suspect himself, and we're going into an area here where it's going to be hard to have a data-based answer. Brian Cole Jr., we just heard, 30 years old, lived with his mom. How do you go about trying to establish the why - the motive for this, if, in fact, he did it?
MUDD: Well, there's two answers to that. You can do that by obviously talking to the subject - in the initial reports are that he is talking. You've obviously got access to the family. He was a gamer, so I assume he has a significant online footprint. How did he talk to other gamers? What did he Google? What kind of websites did he read? So there's a lot of information you can access. But the second piece of this answer is, when you contrast a single player versus a conspiracy, conspiracies typically you have people talking among themselves, and they will have a rationale that we can comprehend. When you're dealing with a singleton - one conspirator - the likelihood that you can really understand what's going on into one human's head who may not have a really rational view of the world, I think, is lower. So he might speak. We might get access to data, but that still doesn't mean that his rationale is going to make a heck of a lot of sense.
INSKEEP: OK. And that leads to another thing, and that's the conspiracy theories. Ryan Lucas mentioned them. One of the theories was promoted by Dan Bongino before he was at the FBI. When he was a commentator, he described the pipe bombs as an inside job. I just want to underline this - based on what we know, any evidence that this person was an insider or that this was an inside job?
MUDD: No. And I can give you evidence against that. Every time I heard this when I was in the inside, it would make me laugh because if you're talking about five years of investigations, you're talking about hundreds and thousands of people involved in those investigations - not only the agents, but the analysts looking through things like phone data and credit card data, the scientists down at Quantico looking at the device. If you want to believe it's an inside job, you've got to believe there a conspiracy among hundreds or thousands of people, all of whom decided not to tell the world that this was really conducted by the FBI. That beggars belief. That just doesn't happen.
INSKEEP: And what questions do you still have as we get this case into court and maybe learn a little bit more over time?
MUDD: Boy, I did this for a living. My question is going back to where we were a couple years ago, and that is, how are new data analysis programs able to crack cases that we would've had a hard time with 15 years ago? That is really interesting.
INSKEEP: Phil Mudd is a former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center and also of of the FBI's - excuse me - National Security Branch. Mr. Mudd, thanks so much.
MUDD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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