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America's Data-Swamped Spy Agencies Pin Their Hopes On AI (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes Phys.org:
Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action.
First rule of Intelligence, don't get caught. Second rule: take every opportunity to filter your raw data so you don't get swamped with useless data. Expert systems are subject to "mistakes" like identifying all rainy pictures as "Tank!" because all the training pictures of tanks were taken on a rainy day. AI, as every gamer knows, is subject to being "Gamed", thereby allowing your opponent to manipulate you to their advantage. More AI means more chances for some kid in a cave (basement) somewhere to trick the military into shooting/bombing an innocent target and hurting America.
It's a while since Edward Snowden's documents were released on line, but I vaguely remember one - a memo between two employees of one of the contractors employed by the US Government [logically that would be BAH, but I do not recall for sure] in which one person was basically saying,
"This is madness - the proposal we've got here would generate so much data that the analysts simply wouldn't be able to assimilate it, much less find anything of value!"
The response was, essentially, some "Management Speak" to the effect of, "Look, our job is not to question our most important client when they want to spend money. You and I both know that they won't be able to make sense of all of this data, but as long as they are paying us, today, to collect and store it, then tomorrow they can pay us to develop the technology to help them make sense of it. Remember, our role here is to maximise shareholder value - in our company..."
If I can find the link to the piece [I am pretty sure it was one of Greenwald's articles] then I'll post it as a link. But if this is vaguely true, then the OP makes complete sense.
It is also worth noting what isn't being said. At no point [in this coverage] is anyone saying, "Wait - if we can't cope with the amount of data we're collecting today, maybe we should scale back what we collect - apply some filters and narrow our search criteria - until we get a more precise data set." Well, maybe that option was reviewed and discarded. Even so, it's quite remarkable that nobody thought to figure out how they were going to analyze all the yottabytes of data that they knew would be generated by the collection systems...
Definitely sounds like a contractor-led initiative to me...