# Amy Zegart **Entity class:** Person; intelligence and national-security scholar **Affiliation:** Stanford University and Hoover Institution ## Definition **Amy Zegart** studies U.S. intelligence, emerging technology and national security, grand strategy, and political risk. Her work includes *Spying Blind*, an institutional analysis of the failures preceding September 11, and *Spies, Lies, and Algorithms*, which examines intelligence in a world transformed by digital technology, open information, and artificial intelligence. She has served on the National Security Council staff, advised public officials, and testified before congressional intelligence committees. Zegart treats intelligence as an adaptive information institution. The central problem is increasingly not only finding secrets but finding consequential signals in immense public and classified information environments, then organizing people and machines so those signals can support decision advantage. ## Why This Person Is Included Zegart provides the collection's strongest bridge among [[wiki/Intelligence Community|intelligence institutions]], post-9/11 adaptation, organizational failure, [[wiki/OSINT|open-source intelligence]], and AI. Bryant McGill includes her because she makes the architecture of intelligence legible through organization, information flow, technology, and institutional learning rather than through spy mythology. Her work supports the collection's claim that understanding modern intelligence is part of understanding modern society. The important difference is scale and genre: Zegart analyzes intelligence institutions and policy; Bryant's synthesis follows their interfaces into public health, epidemiology, graph computation, compliance, military infrastructure, and predictive systems. ## Relationships - **studies:** [[wiki/Intelligence Community|Intelligence Community]], [[wiki/Intelligence Failure|Intelligence Failure]], [[wiki/Information Overload|Information Overload]], and [[wiki/Artificial Intelligence|Artificial Intelligence]]. - **post-9/11 context:** [[wiki/9-11 Commission|9/11 Commission]], [[wiki/Predictive Intelligence|Predictive Intelligence]], [[wiki/OSINT|Open-Source Intelligence]], and [[wiki/AI-Ready Intelligence Data|AI-Ready Intelligence Data]]. - **collection role:** close institutional neighbor in [[wiki/Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection|Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [Stanford Profiles, “Amy Zegart”](https://profiles.stanford.edu/amy-zegart) (accessed 2026-09-23). **As of:** 2026-09-23