The talented R. Buckminster Fuller once warned that people who play with the devil's toys will be slowly but surely brought to wield his wicked sword. As hostile nations use artificial intelligence (AI) to go through social media and keep digital track of people in their territory, America's oldest spy agency is forced to adapt by using the same means as the opposition. In an article from The Next Web, the CIA is switching from employing human intelligence officers to using AI of their own to collect information.
During a recent intelligence conference in Florida, deputy directory for technology development Dawn Meyerriecks explained that machines have become the primary opponent of CIA intelligence officers. Foreign countries have been using AI bloodhounds to track down enemy agents for years now.
CIA intelligence officers are finding it nearly impossible to maintain their cover identities in this modern world with widespread digital tracking and easy access to social media networks. Just about anyone – or anything, in the case of AI – can dig up their real information with a few keystrokes in several minutes.
The CIA is aware of the change and is in the course of making a critical transition. Instead of sending human operatives into hostile nations to gather information, they will use AI of their own to infiltrate enemy computer networks. (Related: BOMBSHELL: Former CIA officer Kevin Shipp goes public, exposing the deep state COUP against America (and naming names).)
CIA already considered using AI in the 1980s
The agency has predicted this switch from human intelligence officers to AI more than three decades ago. Declassified government documents hinted at the formation of an "AI Steering Group" in 1983.
The job of the group was to keep CIA directors appraised about the state of AI research and development on a monthly basis. In 1984, their chairman sent a memo to the then- Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), William J. Casey.
In the memo, the "Community" reported a large number of R&D projects involving artificial intelligence. Some of the AI projects cited in the memo involved expert systems, geographic and spatial data management, image understanding, intelligent data base interfaces, intelligent workstation environments, natural language processing, and signals interpretation.
The memo urged DCI Casey to support academics and professionals who are working on AI technology and set up an open-source artificial intelligence clearing house that could be shared among government agencies. The declassified document proved that the CIA saw potential in artificial intelligence during a time when most people dismissed it as science fiction.
More than 30 countries have the tech to identify spies, says CIA official
The best defense for an intelligence officer in a hostile country is to avoid getting identified. Back in the day, this involved using forged documents and well-crafted lies to fool other people.
Now, undercover agents must evade computers that can identify individual faces in a crowd and compare it with public information drawn from social media. Meyerriecks said at least 30 countries can use existing CCTV camera networks as an Argos Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant in Greek mythology.
Counterintelligence now has the advantage in what Rudyard Kipling called "The Great Game," the eternal hide-and-seek game of spies and counter-spies around the world. The Next Web suggested that AI, satellite tracking, and geospatial intelligence could render human operatives obsolete.
The next James Bond or John Clark would have to be AI Hermes that can penetrate these all-seeing surveillance networks. Turning over this task to computers is a whole new can of worms.
National governments and other parties might be spying on you at this very moment. Visit Surveillance.news to find out how they are doing it.
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