Artificial intelligence will have immense implications for national and international security, and AI’s potential applications for defense and intelligence have been identified by the federal government as a major priority.
There are, however, significant bureaucratic and technical challenges to the adoption and scaling of AI across U.S. defense and intelligence organizations. Moreover, other nations—particularly China and Russia—are also investing in military AI applications. As the strategic competition intensifies, the pressure to deploy untested and poorly understood systems to gain competitive advantage could lead to accidents, failures, and unintended escalation. Read More
Tag Archives: IC
Artificial Intelligence Ethics Framework For The Intelligence Community
This is an ethics guide for United States Intelligence Community personnel on how to procure, design, build, use, protect, consume, and manage AI and related data. Answering these questions, in conjunction with your agency-specific procedures and practices, promotes ethical design of AI consistent with the Principles of AI Ethics for the Intelligence Community.
This guide is not a checklist and some of the concepts discussed herein may not apply in all instances. Instead, this guide is a living document intended to provide stakeholders with a reasoned approach to judgment and to assist with the documentation of considerations associated with the AI lifecycle. In doing so, this guide will enable mission through an enhanced understanding of goals between AI practitioners and managers while promoting the ethical use of AI. Read More
Systematic Literature Review to Investigate the Application of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) with Artificial Intelligence
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a concept to describe the search, collection, analysis, and use of information from open sources, as well as the techniques and tools used. OSINT emerges out of a military need to collect relevant and publicly available information. Through the use of OSINT, it is possible to find specific information that has some knowledge or provides an advantage. Since its emergence, some studies have been done proposing and developing new ways of using OSINT in different areas. In addition to OSINT, another field of study that has also been a worldwide trend and is being used together with other areas is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is the area of computer science responsible for the development of intelligent systems. However, a systematic literature review that investigates the use of OSINT over the years and your application with AI was not found. So, this work has an objective to develop a systematic literature review on OSINT to investigate the application of OSINT with AI. Read More
#icHow AI can empower communities and strengthen democracy
Each Fourth of July for the past five years I’ve written about AI with the potential to positively impact democratic societies. I return to this question in hopes of shining a light on technology that can strengthen communities, protect privacy and freedoms, and otherwise support the public good.
This series is grounded in the principle that artificial intelligence is capable of not just value extraction, but individual and societal empowerment. While AI solutions often propagate bias, they can also be used to detect that bias. As Dr. Safiya Noble has pointed out, artificial intelligence is one of the critical human rights issues of our lifetimes. AI literacy is also, as Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott asserted, a critical part of being an informed citizen in the 21st century. Read More
Artificial intelligence linked to Bin Laden raid is being used to find future threats
After raiding Usama Bin Laden’s compound, the government used artificial intelligence to discover future al-Qaida plans.
… “The large quantity of materials collected from the compound required time for a thorough review,” the CIA said in a report about the raid, adding the agency “led a multi-agency task force to prioritize, catalogue, and analyze them for intelligence about al-Qa`ida’s affiliates, plans and intentions and current threats.” Read More
Artificial Intelligence Outperforms Human Intel Analysts In a Key Area
A Defense Intelligence Agency experiment shows AI and humans have different risk tolerances when data is scarce.
In the 1983 movie WarGames, the world is brought to the edge of nuclear destruction when a military computer using artificial intelligence interprets false data as an imminent Soviet missile strike. Its human overseers in the Defense Department, unsure whether the data is real, can’t convince the AI that it may be wrong. A recent finding from the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, suggests that in a real situation where humans and AI were looking at enemy activity, those positions would be reversed.
Artificial intelligence can actually be more cautious than humans about its conclusions in situations when data is limited. Read More
Artificial Intelligence and UK National Security
The research has found that AI offers numerous opportunities for the UK national security community to improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing processes. AI methods can rapidly derive insights from large, disparate datasets and identify connections that would otherwise go unnoticed by human operators. However, in the context of national security and the powers given to UK intelligence agencies, use of AI could give rise to additional privacy and human rights considerations which would need to be assessed within the existing legal and regulatory framework. For this reason, enhanced policy and guidance is needed to ensure the privacy and human rights implications of national security uses of AI are reviewed on an ongoing basis as new analysis methods are applied to data. The research highlights three ways in which intelligence agencies could seek to deploy AI:
- The automation of administrative organisational processes could offer significant efficiency savings, for instance to assist with routine data management tasks, or improve efficiency of compliance and oversight processes.
- For cybersecurity purposes, AI could proactively identify abnormal network traffic or malicious software and respond to anomalous behaviour in real time.
- For intelligence analysis, ‘Augmented Intelligence’ (AuI) systems could be used to support a range of human analysis processes, including:
- Natural language processing and audiovisual analysis, such as machine translation, speaker identification, object recognition and video summarisation.
- Filtering and triage of material gathered through bulk collection.
- Behavioural analytics to derive insights at the individual subject level.
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Spies Like AI: The Future of Artificial Intelligence for the US Intelligence Community
America’s intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSA’s regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it — analysts, policy-makers and leaders — must better understand how advanced AI systems reach their conclusions.
Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI’s year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t allowed to discuss everything that he’s doing, but he could talk about a few examples. Read More
The US just released 10 principles that it hopes will make AI safer
The principles (with my translation) are:
- Public trust in AI. The government must promote reliable, robust, and trustworthy AI applications.
- Public participation. The public should have a chance to provide feedback in all stages of the rule-making process.
- Scientific integrity and information quality. Policy decisions should be based on science.
- Risk assessment and management. Agencies should decide which risks are and aren’t acceptable.
- Benefits and costs. Agencies should weigh the societal impacts of all proposed regulations.
- Flexibility. Any approach should be able to adapt to rapid changes and updates to AI applications.
- Fairness and nondiscrimination. Agencies should make sure AI systems don’t discriminate illegally.
- Disclosure and transparency. The public will trust AI only if it knows when and how it is being used.
- Safety and security. Agencies should keep all data used by AI systems safe and secure.
- Interagency coordination. Agencies should talk to one another to be consistent and predictable in AI-related policies.
Artificial Intelligence and National Security — Updated November 21, 2019
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing field of technology with potentially significant implications for national security. As such, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and other nations are developing AI applications for a range of military functions. AI research is underway in the fields of intelligence collection and analysis, logistics, cyber operations, information operations, command and control, and in a variety of semiautonomous and autonomous vehicles. Already, AI has been incorporated into military operations in Iraq and Syria. Congressional action has the potential to shape the technology’s development further, with budgetary and legislative decisions influencing the growth of military applications as well as the pace of their adoption.
AI technologies present unique challenges for military integration, particularly because the bulk of AI development is happening in the commercial sector. Although AI is not unique in this regard, the defense acquisition process may need to be adapted for acquiring emerging technologies like AI. In addition, many commercial AI applications must undergo significant modification prior to being functional for the military. A number of cultural issues also challenge AI acquisition, as some commercial AI companies are averse to partnering with DOD due to ethical concerns, and even within the department, there can be resistance to incorporating AI technology into existing weapons systems and processes. Read More
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