On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union successfully launched its Sputnik satellite into low earth orbit. This achievement of the Soviet space programme was not a surprise to US intelligence officials or policymakers; actually, the CIA had been reporting on it for years. But Sputnik was a wake-up call for US science and engineering nationwide. Foreign scientific and technological developments had constituted a key target set for the CIA since its creation, and while the CIA was keeping tabs, America was not keeping up. It has always been crucial to know what capabilities potential enemies are developing; often, the pressure to gather such intelligence has been the catalyst for the agency's own technological intelligence gathering capacity, from the U-2 to imint satellites to micro listening devices. Today, foreign rocket and aircraft capabilities remain vital collection targets, but the leading edge of scientific and technical intelligence concerns exploiting–and defending against–information technology and code. Innovating in this space is as crucial now as the space race was during the Cold War.

New technologies can be both invaluable and disruptive. The development of high-altitude imint capabilities allowed CIA to gain insights into Soviet ‘ground truth’ that were unprecedented, allowing it to support US policymakers and war fighters far more effectively than before. The contributions of the U-2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis are a testimony to the value of technological innovation, complemented by high-level humint, for intelligence. But it also proved disruptive, creating new avenues of risk for the agency and US policy, manifested most notably in the fallout from downing Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Soviet airspace on 1 May 1960, which cast a pall over the Paris summit that month and cancelled Eisenhower's planned visit to Moscow the following month.

The shift to the digital realm has not altered the double-edged sword of technological promise and pitfalls: CIA and the broader US intelligence community have developed significant capability in the cyber domain, but with this come new risks in myriad forms, many more complex and intractable than those faced in the analogue age. Although it may be expected that the National Security Agency might be considered the US intelligence community member most interested and invested in technology, actually CIA's interest in cutting-edge technology should not be surprising: as Jeffrey Richelson has shown, a history of CIA is also a history of innovation.