When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech’s centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.
A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech’s power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech’s monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow. Read More
Tag Archives: IC
Artificial Intelligence: An Accountability Framework for Federal Agencies and Other Entities
As a nation, we have yet to grasp the full benefits or unwanted effects of artificial intelligence. AI is widely used, but how do we know it’s working appropriately?
This report identifies key accountability practices—centered around the principles of governance, data, performance, and monitoring—to help federal agencies and others use AI responsibly. For example, the governance principle calls for users to set clear goals and engage with diverse stakeholders.
To develop these practices, we held a forum on AI oversight with experts from government, industry, and nonprofits. We also interviewed federal inspector general officials and AI experts. Read More
Meet the NSA spies shaping the future
For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States.
Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate, like the rest of the NSA, has a dual mission: secure American systems and spy on the rest of the world. The budget is classified, a secret among secrets, but the NSA is one of the world’s largest spy agencies by any measure and Herrera’s directorate is the entire US intelligence community’s biggest in-house research and development arm. The directorate must come up with solutions to problems that are not yet real, in a world that doesn’t yet exist.
In his first interview since getting the job, Herrera lays out the tech—and threats—his group will now be focusing on. His priorities show how much the NSA’s targets are changing, balancing its work surveilling terror groups with an appreciation of how rapidly the geopolitical landscape has shifted in recent years. And he explains why the rise of new technologies, in terms of both threat and opportunity, are at the heart of what his group must contend with. Read More
COUPCAST
Coups, unlike other political crises that unfold over weeks, months, or years, are precisely timed events aimed at ousting a very specific individual from power. This precision means the risk of a coup may vary greatly over the course of a year. It can change instantaneously during transitions between leaders. For this reason, CoupCast estimates a unique risk of a coup attempt for every individual leader for each month he or she is in power.
This page provides a brief non-technical overview of the CoupCast methodology. For more extensive details, please visit our dataset page. Read More
AI Researchers Portal
Connecting AI researchers to Federal resources that can support their AI work – from grant funding and datasets to computing and testbeds. The National AI Initiative Office’s official site for AI researchers to access datasets, computing resources, and federal grant information. Read More
#artificial-intelligence, #dod, #icNational Security by Platform
During the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, U.S. policymakers had to decide whether to formally recognize the Taliban as the new Afghan government. But the first policymakers to address this question publicly were not government officials. They were trust and safety and public policy executives within major tech platforms Facebook (now Meta), Google and Twitter. Their seemingly minor decision whether to allow the Taliban to use official Afghan government accounts would have major effects, similar to state recognition. If they decided to let the Taliban communicate with the Afghan people through official channels, they would imbue the Taliban with legitimacy. Ultimately, platforms decided to continue banning Taliban content. Read More
This Group Pushed More AI in US Security—and Boosted Big Tech
The National Security Commission on AI included members from Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Some of its recommendations are already federal law.
ORACLE, GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, and Amazon are archenemies in the competitive cloud computing market. But in late 2018, top executives from the four companies, including future Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, teamed up on an unpaid side gig: advising the president and US Congress on how artificial intelligence can bolster national security.
The executives were named to the National Security Commission on AI, created by Congress. Its chair was Eric Schmidt, previously CEO of Google, who later said it would help the US “harness this transformative technology to benefit both our economic and national security interests.” Read More
A national strategy for AI innovation
Cyberspace Is Neither Just an Intelligence Contest, nor a Domain of Military Conflict; SolarWinds Shows Us Why It’s Both
Operations in cyberspace—at least those perpetrated by nation-state actors and their proxies—reflect the geopolitical calculations of the actors who carry them out. Strategic interactions between rivals in cyberspace have been argued by some, like Joshua Rovner or Jon Lindsay, to reflect an intelligence contest. Others, like Jason Healey and Robert Jervis, have suggested that cyberspace is largely a domain of warfare or conflict. The contours of this debate as applied to the SolarWinds campaign have been outlined recently—Melissa Griffith shows how cyberspace is sometimes an intelligence contest, and other times a domain of conflict, depending on the strategic approaches and priorities of particular actors at a given moment in time.
Therefore, rather than focusing on the binary issue of whether a warfare versus intelligence framework is more applicable to cyberspace, the fact that activity in cyberspace takes on both of these characteristics at different times raises interesting questions about how these dimensions relate to one another at the operational level. Read More
AI.gov
The just launched AI.gov is home of the National AI Initiative and connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI. The National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research and application for the Nation’s economic prosperity and national security. The mission of the National AI Initiative is to ensure continued U.S. leadership in AI research and development, lead the world in the development and use of trustworthy AI in the public and private sectors, and prepare the present and future U.S. workforce for the integration of AI systems across all sectors of the economy and society. Read More
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