How Intelligence and AI Are Changing Cyber Defense | Erin Whitmore, Former CIA

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Thank you. So kind of an interesting, interesting start. So I am third generation service to my country. My grandfather was served in World War Two Korea and was killed on an Air America flight in Vietnam.

He’s on the first panel of the wall, honestly, or obviously, there’s, you know, a lot of interest there, as Air America is a now declassified CIA mission, and that sort of that service was kind of instilled in me young, from a very young age.

My father, in that that’s my grandfather, my mother’s side. My father, right, was a career in combat helicopter pilot. He flew Black Hawk helicopters for my entire life.

And I remember when I was nine years old, he served in he was going to serve in Bosnia on a peacekeeping mission.

And he handed me a book called slary, and it was about a little girl in the siege of Sarajevo, and he said, I need, I want you to read this book so that you can understand why I’m going to go help these people and I won’t be there for you.

And that was a really pivotal and changing point in my life, because it set me on this trajectory of wanting to do something in national security at first, right? And when I went to college, I wanted to go to law school.

And I was so determined that I was going to, you know, it’s going to go, it’s going to do international humanitarian law, which is known as law of armed conflict. So I studied abroad in Geneva.

I did all those things, and then I graduated in the unfortunate year of 2009 when we went into a massive global recession and there were no entry level jobs. So I said, okay, so everybody was flocking to law schools and doing this and that.

And I said, well, I need to go get some experience. So I raised my hand. I went to AmeriCorps, where I worked in Baltimore City high schools working to help basically underserved and underprivileged communities.

So it was through that time that I ended up meeting a lot of people that served in the intelligence community. And I thought to myself, Oh, this is something that I…

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