Fake News with AI please: Spies will soon be a thing of the past, and the CIA seems to know it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the agency's deputy director for technology development, recently told a conference in Florida that the CIA is adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is machines, not foreign agents.
Meyerriecks, speaking to CNN after the conference, said many countries have been using AI to track down enemy agents for years.
He continued to explain the difficulties faced by today's CIA spies when trying to live under a covert identity in the era of digital surveillance and social networks, indicating that the modern world is becoming a very inhospitable environment for the spies we knew.
But the CIA will not give up. America's oldest information service is beginning to transform itself and instead of using people around the world to gather information, it uses computers to produce the same work even more efficiently.
This transition from people to computers is something the CIA processes and prepares for more than 30 years.
Government documents from 1984 (!) describe a “team καθοδήγησης AI”, η οποία ιδρύθηκε το προηγούμενο έτος (1983). Η ομάδα ήταν υπεύθυνη για την παροχή μηνιαίων εκθέσεων στους προϊσταμένους της CIA που περιέγραφαν την κατάσταση της έρευνας και της ανάπτυξης της artificialof intelligence.
In a declassified 1984 note (PDF) to the director of the CIA, the chairman of the AI steering group states:
An encouraging number of AI R&D efforts have been initiated through the Community. They include areas such as expert systems, processing language, intelligent data base interfaces, image understanding, signal interpretation, geographical and spatial data management as well as intelligent workstation environments.
So the CIA seems to be dealing with AI technology when most of us thought it was science fiction.
This document requires more training for agents, emphasis on support of AI developers in both academic and professional settings, as well as the creation of an open source clearinghouse for the exchange of information from government services.
Today's spies face the same problem that yesterday faced: the need to be invisible.
What has changed is the opponent. So instead of having to trick people with fake documents and disinformation, agents should trick computers that can detect a specific face in the crowd. As you can see here, Fake News now takes on another dimension. Fake News for misinforming the opponent, for hiding identity, but also for placing information that is beneficial.
According to Meyerriecks, at least 30 countries have the ability to do so with current CCTV camera systems. This means that too many AI tools now have the upper hand in the international game of concealing and searching the global information community.
We always believed that spies like James Bond had the coolest gadgets. But apparently, the time has come for gadgets to replace James Bond himself.
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