William Hannas

William Hannas is the lead analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Prior to joining CSET, Bill was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as an executive expert for advanced technical projects, and was a three-time recipient of the McCone Award for technological innovation. Bill was an assistant professor of Chinese at Georgetown, where he taught Chinese and Korean, and concurrently served with the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, monitoring Asian language publications. He began his career on submarines and as a cryptanalyst of foreign ciphers.

Bill holds a B.A. in Chinese and Russian history from Temple University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in Chinese, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in East Asian languages and linguistics. Between degrees, Bill studied and taught at Yonsei University in Seoul and National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, and served with the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. Bill is the author of Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (1997), The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (2003), primary author of Chinese Industrial Espionage (2013), and co-editor of China’s Quest for Foreign Technology (2021) and Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence (2023).