What if the next decisive intelligence advantage isn’t a recruited insider but a nation’s ability to model entire societies from its digital exhaust? Salt Typhoon’s multi-year cyber campaigns against U.S. telecommunications networks and critical infrastructure demonstrate China’s unparalleled focus on data-centric espionage: collect widely, analyze fast, and operationalize at scale — alongside continued investments in traditional intelligence disciplines. This approach reshapes how the United States has conventionally thought about intelligence advantage.  From Exquisite to ExhaustFor decades, the U.S. intelligence community has prized what analysts call “exquisite” intelligence: narrowly sourced, high-confidence insight into adversary in