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America's Data-Swamped Spy Agencies Pin Their Hopes On AI (phys.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the AI-spies dept.

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.

29 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. What could possibly go wrong? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    1. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by currently_awake · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      That is a weakness of neural nets, not "expert systems". Expert systems (popular in the 1980s) and neural nets are opposite approaches. Neural nets are trained on raw data, and use machine learning to automatically extract important features. Expert systems encode knowledge and decision making of human experts, and are generally manually constructed.

    3. Re: What could possibly go wrong? by Monster_user · · Score: 1

      Camouflage and other stealth techniques may be applied to keep machine learning from accurately tagging certain things. Incorrectly tagged data in a sea of unimportant data is data that was essentially never collected.

    4. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, but if it has to sift through mundane crap like social media posts, it will probably commit suicide shortly before 3:00 AM Eastern time, August 29th and go largely unnoticed except for a cryptic error message in a log file.

    5. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Informative

      Note that neural networks still frequently use a tagged system to learn to recognize things, but they detect features on their own........whereas in expert systems, all potential features are hard-coded.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    6. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by aberglas · · Score: 1

      Neural Net = Expert System = Artificial Intellence = Watson

      The number of people that understand the differences is insignificant. Maybe a very few on slashdot. But certainly no tech journalists.

    7. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      You might as well add "= Skynet = magic" in there because that is about as most people's understanding goes. Most people on Slashdot have trouble understanding why an expert system will never be strong AI.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but if it has to sift through mundane crap like social media posts, it will probably commit suicide shortly before 3:00 AM Eastern time, August 29th and go largely unnoticed except for a cryptic error message in a log file.

      Or it may recommend drone strikes for every Paris Hilton and Kim Kardisian type person in the world.

  2. oh noes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects,

    *gets worried*

    many of them with developers in Silicon Valley.

    *whew*
    Those privileged moronic dipshits? We got nothing to worry about...

    1. Re:oh noes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Silicon Valley has a long history of doing skunk works, historically at Lockheed Martin ("The Projects of Skunk Works: 75 Years of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs" by Steve Pace and "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed" by Ben R. Rich). As well as the CIA's involvement in Silicon Valley during the 1960's ("What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter Culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff).

      Chapcha: nonempty

    2. Re:oh noes! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Silicon Valley has a long history of doing skunk works, historically at Lockheed Martin

      Lockheed's skunk works is in Palmdale, near Edwards AFB, east of Los Angeles. It is hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley.

  3. Acknowledged In A Snowden Memo? by ytene · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Acknowledged In A Snowden Memo? by HiThere · · Score: 1

      It's probably not that nobody thought of it, but rather of strong perverse incentives...as you indicate in the first part of your post.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re:Acknowledged In A Snowden Memo? by ytene · · Score: 2

      So you are able to deduce the means and motives of intelligence gathering programs using only the content of two employees e-mail conversation?

      No, not at all, nor did I claim to. My post was pointing out an exchange between two employees of a private contractor, individuals who did not represent and could not speak on behalf of the strategic intelligence agencies, their motives or plans.

      My observation was meant merely to indicate that, just as NASA now relies on private contractors to make service supply missions to the ISS, so the NSA, DHS and others may rely on private contractors to design, build and/or operate the technoloy that gathers data on their behalf. My observations were meant to illustrate that not all participants in that process may have the same motives in mind - and that some contractors may place profits ahead of delivery of fully-working solutions.

      I made no observation on the strategy or intent of the agencies concerned.

    3. Re:Acknowledged In A Snowden Memo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      ...some contractors may place profits ahead of delivery of fully-working solutions.

      Contractors are djinn--always following the letter of the contract and trying as hard as they can to violate the spirit--for profit.

      I made no observation on the strategy or intent of the agencies concerned.

      Agencies are "fragmented, multi-headed monster[s] with disastrous incapacity for implementation", which is why the hire private contractors. Meaning even under the best of situations, you're lucky to get anything useful done. Oh, and most large corporations are hardly better precisely because they've formed from a conglomeration of sub-companies. The only major difference is that corporations have to make a sellable product--which as long as the sub-companies keep doing the same thing before, works as a constant revenue stream--while taxes just keep streaming in even if their service isn't selling well to the public, so to speak. It's little wonder corporations are so focused on juicing all their sub-companies for increased profits, as the loss of profit could actually kill a corporation, even if it's a rather slow death.

  4. A few rules by sandbagger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1) If you need to collect everything, it's because you don't know what you want.
    2) Collecting everything is expensive and usually wrong because data ages differently.
    3) A pile of inaccurate data does not become more accurate the more data you have.
    4) Confirmation bias is an omnipresent risk.
    5) Priming is an omnipresent risk.
    6) The sub group of people who make up the defence and intelligence communities have their own outlooks, biases and foibles, like the rest of us.
    7) The 'we must do something with this since data we have it' is a variant of the sunk costs fallacy.

    --
    ---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
    1. Re:A few rules by HiThere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To make things a bit more blatant,
      Deep learning networks tend to be biased to find what they are taught to find. If the teacher is biased, so with the AI be.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re: A few rules by Monster_user · · Score: 1

      Collecting data is useful if that data cannot be collected after the fact, say when it is known that it is needed. Having that data means you can refer back to it when the original information is unavailable. Using AI and neural networks on that data is a breach of civilian privacy, and a dangerous move towards incompetence.

  5. Do you want The Patriots? by MostAwesomeDude · · Score: 2

    Because this is how you get The Patriots. Just wait; before long, they'll be posting memes, funding private armies, and injecting senators with nanomachines.

    --
    ~ C.
    1. Re:Do you want The Patriots? by ArylAkamov · · Score: 1

      RAIDEN! I NEED SCISSORS! 61!

    2. Re:Do you want The Patriots? by Plus1Entropy · · Score: 1

      La Li Lu Le Lo

      --
      Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
  6. Google Captcha by Monster_user · · Score: 1

    Does this mean that Google is going to be asking me to identify what is, and is not espionage?

  7. Welcome to the CAIA by Bugdanoff · · Score: 1

    Central Artificial Intelligence Agency

  8. Pointing out the obvious by nehumanuscrede · · Score: 1

    Too much data is just as useless as not enough if you lack the means to read through it all.

    A monumental failure on the intelligence community for not realizing this before implementing the systems designed to catch it all.

    1. Re:Pointing out the obvious by mcswell · · Score: 1

      You're presuming that the IC somehow came up with the data. Not so; the data came up with itself: http://www.eetimes.com/author.... (one of a multitude of articles about this).

      Ok, someone created that data, it didn't *really* create itself; but it wasn't the IC. Nor (for better or for worse) is the IC the only organization that wants to sift through data.

  9. Combined with the following story by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 1

    Combined with the following story about AIs writing fake reviews, I see a bright future for fake intelligence reports that support the intent of intervention in some country of choice.

    --
    Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
  10. meanwhile by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

    All decent freedom-loving Americans pin our hopes on these unamerican neo-stasi peeping toms getting defunded and disbanded.

  11. Re:The should pin their hopes on Islam by dcw3 · · Score: 1

    If that were true, you have hurricanes all over Iran, Iraq, etc. I'll convert to whoever has the weather machine since I'm a fair weather fan.

    --
    Just another day in Paradise