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CIA Plans To Replace Spies With AI (thenextweb.com)

Posted by msmash on from the change-in-plans dept.

Human spies could soon be relics of the past. Dawn Meyerriecks, CIA's deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida that CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent. From a report: Meyerriecks, speaking to CNN after the conference, said other countries have relied on AI to track enemy agents for years. She went on to explain the difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media, indicating the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies. But the CIA isn't about to give up. America's oldest spy agency is transforming from the kind of outfit that sends people around the globe to gather information, to the type that uses computers to accomplish the same task more efficiently. This transition from humans to computers is something the CIA has spent more than 30 years preparing for.

35 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Copyright Infringement.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They copied that from one of the last bond films. Someone should sue.

    1. Re:Copyright Infringement.... by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

      My concern is that they'll train the AI using the bond films and then I'm going to be in trouble!

    2. Re:Copyright Infringement.... by desdinova+216 · · Score: 1

      it could be worse, they could use Archer

    3. Re:Copyright Infringement.... by gnick · · Score: 1

      Archer would be pretty easy to profile. The first time a cartoon character is admitted to the hospital with cirrhosis, they just have to get him to speak. His voice will give him away. He sounds just like the guy from Bob's Burgers.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  2. AI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Call me when AI can ener your house and put hidden listening devices. Oh ... wait...

    1. Re:AI? by Streetlight · · Score: 1

      Call me when AI can ener your house and put hidden listening devices. Oh ... wait...

      I assume you're thinking all those IOT devices from Google, Amazon, etc., and Facebook and connected sites (whether you are a subscriber or not) are doing the work of CIA spies.

      --
      In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
    2. Re:AI? by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      I'd be surprised if they haven't shown up to XYZ headquarters with a warrant, a gag-order, and a fat check to cover the cost of pushing a selective update to a (hopefully) select individual.

      Apple got in the news for resisting a request/command for breaking their iphone security wholesale. You wouldn't hear about the companies that comply with the gag order. But even Apple's canary has been dead for years. So has Reddit's..

    3. Re:AI? by BlueStrat · · Score: 1

      I'd be surprised if they haven't shown up to XYZ headquarters with a warrant, a gag-order, and a fat check to cover the cost of pushing a selective update to a (hopefully) select individual.

      Apple got in the news for resisting a request/command for breaking their iphone security wholesale. You wouldn't hear about the companies that comply with the gag order. But even Apple's canary has been dead for years. So has Reddit's. [wikipedia.org].

      Which all just further proves that the biggest threat to America (and much of the rest of the free world) is the US Government which abandoned any pretense of "Constitutionally limited powers" long ago.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
  3. Why not go the whole hog ... by Alain+Williams · · Score: 3, Insightful

    produce a VR world where the spies can chase after each other and leave the rest of us alone.

  4. What could possibly go wrong? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought CIA had already been deficient enough when it came to HUMINT. Now they propose to scale even further back when it comes to people immersed in the environment and attuned to the meaningful signals and things out of order? I can't see what could possibly go wrong with that...

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by physicsphairy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The CIA being the CIA, it's a good policy to let other countries think that they are dispensing with their human spies if, in fact, they aren't (so they receive less scrutiny). It's also an advantage to paralyze enemy's use of technology by making them paranoid. Or to cause them to give away the location of sensitive data by clumsily trying to protect it against a new threat. And if the enemy doesn't respond that way, then the CIA can continue development and reap the actual benefits of wielding AI against an unprepared enemy. I wouldn't take information they publicly disclose too literally.

      --
      When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
    2. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      One of the good things Bush Jr did was to recognize that:

      http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/18/bush.intelligence/index.html

      You'll never do as well with just information you can get over the Internet or satellite pictures as compared to "a man on the ground"

      I was approached in 2010 as a resource since it was noticed I was always angry and agitated. Apparently that's one of the key things they look for. I was working 80+ hours a week for a Chinese-owned start-up so of course I was. I also was MOS 35M (human intelligence) in the US army, but I never really did anything related to that and had a mortgage I couldn't pay after a pay cut. I said no and to never contact me again. Less than six months later I was laid-off and didn't have unused vacation time (and all of it was unused since we didn't allow any time off) paid.

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

      Wow, an article post-2002 from CNN about Bush that wasn't negative.

      I'm more surprised the Chinese didn't approach you. I've worked in tech for over forty years in the Seattle area, and I have several friends that claim to have been approached by them. You sound like the perfect candidate to get leverage on.

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

      The problem for the CIA is finding people who where never on social media and who have the needed international skills.
      Every useful graduate that has language, arts, science to a standard that can pass as educated internationally had some online history.
      What nations that the CIA is spy on did was buy into a lot of US social media data and build a large real time database of decades of US education.
      Anyone in the USA who is educated to any useful "CIA" standard is now online as part of the US education system.

      Great for the US education system and the graduates looking for work.
      No so good for the CIA trying to pass a CIA spy as part of the US diplomatic workforce for decades of embassy work.
      That persons past does not fit with the history presented and the work done in the embassy.
      Other nations the CIA likes to spy on have created and contracted a lot of US detective agencies and US investigators who do pre-employment screening on workers. All US workers.
      Their real time decades of data sets allow most nations to build up a database of every US graduate and "worker" with the academic ability to work internationally.

      The CIA attempted to create past factual histories online for missions but if the data was not in place years ago and in the hands of the private investigators it does hold up. New data given to US social media stands out when placed in trying to look a decade old.
      The only way around this is to use real US citizens who get asked to work for the CIA in another nation.
      Business, NGO, charity, people of faith, engineers, historians, tourists, medical experts all get approached to be "CIA" and report back on their visit to another nation the CIA is interested in. Their past is perfect as it is all "true" and other nations are trusting of average people.

      The AI is just an internal CIA database of all the normal people from everyday US who are now working for the CIA around the world.
      Its not real spies the CIA knows and trusts so its "artificial intelligence" as in the people doing the spying for the USA are not classic CIA spies in any way.

      A CIA computer system gets asked to find the best US graduates to spy on China. That group of people get approached and the CIA offers them a deal before their next trip to China.
      That person works, holidays, studies in China with a few side tasks for the CIA and then returns to the USA with their reports.

      The problem for the CIA is that it cant trust the people it is now contracting to be spies.
      They did not come from within the CIA and all its own investigations.
      Split loyalty and Communist support then becomes a risk for the CIA when approaching US academics to spy for the CIA.

      Social media and its images upset decades of easy CIA spying globally.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    5. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by BrianMarshall · · Score: 2

      ...when it comes to people immersed in the environment...

      If the CIA needs to... uh... "immerse people in an environment", AI alone isn't enough - they will need some hardware... /dev/wtrbrd maybe.

      --
      "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
    6. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      They probably think that the AI is less likely to leak information on moral grounds, or be turned into a double agent.

      Or maybe it's a response to them having too much data to sift through, thanks to the NSA feeding them "full take" dumps and the like. That's the goal remember, listen to and watch everything everywhere all the time. No source too small or insignificant, just filter it all into the great database and let the AI run wild making connections.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  5. The Inhospitable Seeds You Sow. by geekmux · · Score: 2

    "...difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media...the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies."

    Hope standing by and allowing social media to violently fuck over the concept of privacy while granting those mega-corps Too Big To Fail status was worth it for all those who are now struggling in this "inhospitable" environment...

  6. Who's AI is bigger? by bobbied · · Score: 1

    MY AI is BIGGER than your ai... I win!

    This article is garbage... Who in their right mind thinks this even could happen?

    Seriously, who believes this tripe? No human spies eh? Yea... Not going to happen.. Just like taking the pilot out of fighter aircraft isn't going to happen. Sure, SOME activities will be automated, but humans are going to be a part of these activities for as long as more than one human is alive.. I know it sounds tempting and the common wisdom is AI will take over all sorts of complex things, but it won't really. Sure, AI will make tasks less complex and take over the mundane, but It's not doing these pie in the sky kind of things any time soon...

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    1. Re:Who's AI is bigger? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      No human spies does not mean no human analysts. It relates to not sending agents into other countries to conduct criminal activities, often in association with organised crime in those countries. Rather the insertion of electronic hacking devices. Depending upon how, small, how they obtain power, how effectively they can secret insert and how widespread those insertion are. The boundary of war, level hacking insertions, millions of device. That is high level and does not count the simple stuff like Windows anal probe 10 with targeted backdoors via unique updates. Of course all hardware and software supplied by any US company is expect to have back doors for overseas deployment.

      This in preference to proper policing treaties, hence no need to spy but no war profits, who wants those.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    2. Re:Who's AI is bigger? by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Human activity is NOT electronic, so spying via AI then is easily subverted. Just keep things personal and/or off the electronic infrastructure your adversaries can monitor. Only a fool would think AI can monitor stuff it cannot possibly see.

      Yea, AI might be able to sort though reams and reams of data looking for information, but it's never going to see stuff that's not in the data it can collect. There will need to be "spies on the ground" forever, both to bypass electronic monitoring and infiltrate to collect information in ways that cannot be monitored..

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  7. Strike the word "spies" from this sentence: by ffkom · · Score: 1

    "in the era of digital tracking and social media, indicating the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to humans."

    That's the correct statement.

  8. Got the perfect name for it... by Smidge204 · · Score: 2

    Call it "Project 2501"

    Now we'll just need a war where the Korean peninsula gets nuked into oblivion and we'll get set.
    =Smidge=

  9. Does this mean future spy movies by k6mfw · · Score: 3, Funny

    are going to be really boring except for computer nerds?

    --
    mfwright@batnet.com
    1. Re:Does this mean future spy movies by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      A communist nation sends its spy into the USA to become friends with a US nerd as a movie plot.
      Years of UK pop culture, US computer lore. The politics and university life all getting used to become cyber friends.
      The nerd is so happy to have a real friend they start spying for "reasons".
      Slowly the Communist nation helps the US nerd advance in their day job. Getting more clearances and access to secret US mil/gov information.
      US security has to work hard to discover the well placed nerd spy.
      Not the charm and fun of the classic Romeo Spies but its a spy plot with nerds. It could be a very satisfying movie.
      The CIA working with the NSA and GCHQ with help from MI6 to find the nerd that got a US embassy job. Think of the international cities in the plot.
      Switzerland? Hong Kong?

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    2. Re:Does this mean future spy movies by k6mfw · · Score: 1

      Slowly the Communist nation helps the US nerd advance in their day job.

      But never help him get a date?

      --
      mfwright@batnet.com
  10. What could possibly go wrong by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 1

    HUMINT tends to actually understand what's going on, while AI believes what it thinks it sees and the apparent patterns it's presented with. You can fool an AI fairly easily, because they're designed that way, but using an AI to add data for HUMINT can also horribly go wrong. Just ask anyone in: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, pretty much all of Africa, etc.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  11. Fewer analysts going nuts by VeryFluffyBunny · · Score: 2

    I think they mean that they'll do more computer assisted analysis of surveillance data than currently. At the moment, a whole lotta people sit in windowless rooms going through piles of data that's been automatically flagged as interesting by current SIGINT algorithms. My bet is that computers will take over more of this mundane, tedious, soul-destroying work so that fewer analysts can go through more data more easily and be able to pick out patterns and interesting anomalies to report to the higher-ups.

    They're also trawling through orders of magnitude more SIGINT data than in the last millennium so the only feasible way to go through it is computer-assisted.

    --
    Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
  12. Training by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    The usual scheme is to train IA with human gathered information. Once IA replaces human, how will it absorb new information required because the target adapts to new threats?

  13. They never learn... by hyades1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Go back half a century or so, and substitute "satellite" for "AI". The CIA let its efforts to recruit and/or train spies suffer to invest in various means of electronic information gathering. Training and recruiting is difficult, expensive and requires high-level decisions about the reliability of an agent and/or his information. This leads to a level of accountability many career civil servants don't necessarily want.

    Unfortunately the change of direction meant the CIA lost its place as one of the top intelligence agencies in the Free World. I'm not saying it was horrible or incompetent, just not necessarily the place to go for a comprehensive picture of what was happening inside Russia, China and countless ugly little dictatorships.

    So now so-called "artificial intelligence" is going to save the day?

    It won't. The single best way to get intelligence is to have a lot of well-concealed, top level spies who have access to it. I doubt that will change for a long, long time.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  14. Re:Messaging is important for humanity by vtcodger · · Score: 1

    Ahem.... How do we decrypt your post? Is the fact that every other word starts with the letters "crypt" some sort of clue as to how to crack whatever code you are using? Our AI keeps giving us segmentation errors when we attempt to decode it.

    PS - My bosses in Tashkent are very curious about this matter.

    --
    You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
  15. Surveillance Society Hits the CIA by crunchygranola · · Score: 1

    Ubiquitous cameras, social media, the web generally, facial recognition software and unlimited data storage is stripping anonymity away from everybody.

    Combine that with data bases on everybody (cough - Facebook - cough - Google - cough) and it becomes impossible to maintain a 'legend'.

    It makes sense that it is making old-school cloak-and-dagger work obsolete.

    --
    Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
  16. Trenchcoat-wearing spy sits on park bench... by tgibson · · Score: 4, Funny

    "The mongoose is cold in Alberta this year."

    "Can you elaborate on that?"

    "Uh...the mongoose is cold in Alberta this year."

    "Would you like to discuss your mongoose?"

    "Eliza, is that you?"

  17. This would be... by argStyopa · · Score: 2

    ...the CIA that *missed* the fall of the Soviet Union - you know, the ONE THING they were tasked with watching, analyzing, studying, and understanding?

    Yeah, they're doing a GREAT job.

    --
    -Styopa
  18. The Clinton Administration thought the same thing by dwillden · · Score: 1

    The fact is the best intelligence is that gathered by trained, experienced agents on the ground. An AI can't go into villages in Afghanistan that have no power and cultivate relationships of trust that result in the production of useful intelligence. The AI can't run agents even in technological countries where often the safest method of transferring information out is via old school mechanical or photo-optical means.

    If it's a matter of life and death are you really going to trust that the nation you are spying on hasn't penetrated the security of the networking tools you at using. Or do you pass information via microfiche in a dead-drop. The AI can't pick up the dead-drop placed in the middle of a park.

    As I said in my subject line. In the 90's the Clinton Administration thought satellites could do everything and substantially down-sized the Humint capabilities (human agents that talk to humans) of the intelligence community. This meant after 9/11 we were actually scrambling to come up with sufficient resources (agents) to do the jobs needed.

    This official is an idiot, and hopefully there are others in place who remember the mistakes of the 90's and ignore him. Yes AI can most likely improve the analysis of all the information we can collect. But it still takes humans to collect the most reliable intelligence.

    --
    I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
  19. How stupid can they be... or is it Trump? by whitroth · · Score: 1

    Are his people pushing this idiocy?

    I mean, really, AI's going to deal with zillions of burner phones? And do they *really* think that what goes on in cafes, or close rooms, is actually all being recorded?

    Maybe all us real humans should leave the planet, and then they can have the whole planet as a porr-quality game.....