Security threats like cyber-espionage, economic warfare and disinformation campaigns by states like China and Russia are growing in potency and sophistication thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and its use as an analysis tool. As Cormac Meiners, U.S. Federal Lead at i2 Group argues, the winners will be those intelligence services that can out-think and out-decide their adversaries, which is why i2 Group is investing in scalable, modular AI solutions that western intelligence professionals can deploy across a diverse range of security interests
The U.S. intelligence service is retooling itself as the multi-dimensional threats that persistently challenge our national security move into a dangerous and more high-risk era.
When once counterterrorism focused the minds of intelligence chiefs, we are now witnessing a profound shift towards great power competition with adversaries such as China and Russia, which have both upped their game in the use of sophisticated tools and tactics to analyse intelligence. In some respects, this is a return to the old Cold War era but with one notable difference.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have become a game-changer, arming U.S. intelligence professionals (and their adversaries) with the means to collect, process and act on vast data volumes at unprecedented speed.
Loaded into state-of-the-art intelligence analysis software, these AI insights enable the intelligence community in each respective nation state to detect threats and visualise complex data relationships more quickly and with greater accuracy than ever before.
AI is not just augmenting the intelligence cycle; it’s redefining the pace and precision with which agencies can respond to threats in real time.
Counterterrorism shift to strategic competition
Ever since the Cold War concluded and global terrorism took centre stage with notable events like 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community has refined its techniques for tracking terrorist networks around the globe. Typically, these methods have relied on the expertise of intelligence professionals deploying manual link analysis and long-cycle decision making to identify security threats from what are often rogue actors possessing limited capabilities.
However, in recent years, nation-state adversaries have lifted the security threats up several notches, executing sophisticated, multi-domain strategies that can play out over many years and which usually involve multiple vectors – cyber, economic, informational, and even environmental.
The intensity, scale and multi-dimensional nature of these security threats means intelligence analysts must deploy new methods to acquire valuable intelligence insights from what are ever growing troves of structured and unstructured data sources – from open-source intelligence (OSINT) and intercepted signals to social media and financial transactions.
AI delivers speed, scale and context
Whereas previously intelligence analysts could spend long periods painstakingly sifting through reports to identify patterns manually, AI-enabled software platforms that deploy machine learning, natural language processing and advanced identity resolution to detect multiple, albeit connected, relationships can reduce intelligence sourcing from days to minutes. Importantly, they can achieve this with a higher degree of confidence than before. In other words, AI delivers what we call in the intelligence world ‘decision advantage’. It speeds up how quickly you can move from data to insight to action.
Human-AI collaboration is critical
For all the intelligence benefits AI delivers, however, the best outcomes happen when intelligence analysts and machines combine their respective strengths. While AI brings speed, scalability and pattern recognition, the intelligence analyst retains a critical post, contributing intuition, cultural knowledge and mission context.
But it’s more important than that. By maintaining the analyst’s oversight, intelligence services can ensure AI-generated deliverables are vetted, are presented in the correct context and are actioned appropriately. This human-AI collaboration is especially critical in the highly sensitive and high-stakes national security field because the human can provide accountability and will engender trust.
Building on current capabilities
Although AI takes intelligence analysis to an entirely new level, foundational methods like visual link analysis must remain at the heart of the process. It’s how analysts see ‘the forest and the trees’ or, in other words, it enables analysts to identify not just who is connected, but how and why those relationships matter.
This is why i2 Analyst’s Notebook integrates AI-assisted features alongside visual link analysis so that intelligence professionals that use the software can promptly identify surface anomalies, clusters and leading actors operating in networks. When used together analysts can build hypotheses and test scenarios, both with greater speed and clarity.
Operational coherence with multi-source data fusion
The days when intelligence analysts could work in silos is no longer a viable proposition. Thanks to multi-source data fusion, analysts can now pull disparate data sets such as sensor data, satellite imagery, chat logs, financial records into a single place providing intelligence analysts with a coherent picture of what are often complex operations.
And this is where AI comes into play, supporting this fusion by providing tagging and relevance scoring across many different data sources. This allows intelligence
professionals to move from what we call situation awareness to true situational understanding.
Managing governance and ethics
Understandably, deploying AI in sensitive and high stakes industries like national security requires users to seriously consider the ethical and governance implications involved.
Important considerations such as transparency, auditability and bias mitigation cannot be ignored, especially when intelligence professionals are making potentially life-or-death decisions or when their actions could impact on civil liberties.
Consequently, governance controls and accountability measures must be designed and integrated in software early on and, in fact, policymakers and oversight bodies increasingly mandate that they are, which is why i2 Analyst’s Notebook includes these features in the analysis solution it provides.
No time to stand still
And while this is going on, it’s important to stress that the pace of innovation in advanced technologies like AI will only pick up as our intelligence adversaries look to exploit any security advantages they can gain by being one step ahead.
Without meaning to be alarmist, we are literally in an arms race of information and insight and the stakes are incredibly high; the winners will be the intelligence services that can out-think and out-decide their intelligence adversaries, not just outgun them.
Scalable and modular AI solutions
With the reality of these security threats firmly at the front of our minds, i2 Group has been investing in modular AI solutions that work at scale, in real time and under pressure, so that our intelligence clients can action the technology across a multitude of security fronts whether that is battlefield edge deployments or national-level analysis centres.
But these scalable, modular AI solutions are not limited to the defence sector. As we are increasingly seeing, private-sector firms, particularly financial institutions and critical infrastructure operators, are vulnerable to a growing barrage of cyber threats and geopolitical risk. Understandably, as a result, many are turning to intelligence-grade tools like i2 Analyst’s Notebook to strengthen their arsenal of analytical capabilities.
Use cases such as insider threats, supply chain monitoring or global risk assessment are examples of where the line between national security and commercial security has blurred.
Final thoughts
As global tensions between power blocs becomes ever more acute and the means to threaten national security more sophisticated and multi-pronged, experts like i2 Group are delivering the tools that enable analysts to continue to protect people, assets and values. The mission hasn’t changed, but now we have the means to do this more quickly, in a smarter way and also adhere to the ethical and governance considerations that are required.
What is changing most is how we rise to the multi-dimensional challenges presented by an increasingly dangerous world and AI is a big part of how we can strengthen our defences and means of attack.
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Note: This article is based on an interview and article that appeared on BizTechReports. Click here to visit the original article.
