Amaryllis Fox knows how to spot something 99.999% of people can't spot: acts of terrorism before they happen. She's whittled it down to a near-science just by observing some key elements in local communities and how they tie in to unrest at large. For instance, if there's a lot of hookah bars and madrases in one area there's likely to be conflict between the old and the younger generations, which further down the line can lead to unrest. And something as simple as keeping tabs on the living wage of a border guard—think the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan—could be a good indicator of spotting a potential bribe. With an eye (and a mind) for things like this, Fox shows why these small conditions are indicators of unrest sometimes months and years before they happen in the news.

There was an appropriately great deal of outrage surrounding the "Russian hacking" of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but that was by no means the first time a government has tampered with a foreign country's change of power. As former CIA operative Amaryllis Fox explains, there is large historical database compiled by Dov Levin at Carnegie Mellon University which contains covert and overt cases of direct election meddling between 1946 and 2000—a dataset that does not even include coups and other attempts at regime changes. What may or may not (at all) be surprising to most people is that 11% of all global elections in that time frame had interference from the U.S. and Russia, and in 70% of those instances it was the U.S. pulling the strings—for example, the 2000 Serbian election, in which the U.S. funded and supported the opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica against human-rights violator Slobodan Milošević. There is a tense point at which legality and ethics clash, and Fox states that in some cases it may actually be irresponsible for a world power not to intervene in an election. Of course, everyone believes their cause is worthy, so which interferences are seen as "noble" as opposed to criminal can be subjective. What is much more certain is that technology is changing nations' ability to tamper with elections significantly. Fox explains a few key methods—from information warfare to AI developments—and will leave positions of power more vulnerable to outside influence in the future. She holds onto the idea of integrity however, and hopes that notion is not completely of a bygone era.