Surveillance has evolved from intercepting what people deliberately communicate to detecting what they involuntarily reveal. Who controls these capabilities? Can legislation and oversight keep pace? And what happens when surveillance no longer requires us to communicate or even carry a device?

CTO and Inventor Mike Hawkes returns to the Collators to trace the evolution of surveillance from the earliest days of radio interception to a world of smartphones, mesh networks, and Wi-Fi routers. We also discuss the growing gap between collecting information and understanding it, and whether we are about to use AI to charge into an Orwellian situation?

Carmen Medina, former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, returns to The Collators to discuss her new project capturing the hard-won lessons, adages and mental cues that help analysts think better.

The conversation becomes a deep exploration of what analysis actually is. What happens between reading and writing? Is insight something that can be taught? Are analysts too focused on argument, and not enough on thinking? And how do our tools, categories, filters, emotions and intuitions shape what we are able to know?

Dean Baratta joins The Collators to discuss a career that has taken him from Cold War military intelligence to law enforcement, homeland security, and the private sector. Dean also reflects on the future of the field, the danger of losing apprenticeship style learning, and why the next generation of analysts will need more than technology to remain useful.

The conversation explores what changes when intelligence analysis leaves the traditional intelligence world: how analysts adapt to new cultures, how they communicate risk without causing panic, whether analysts should make recommendations or just assess the situation.