The US government used artificial intelligence to discover future Al-Qaeda plans, after raiding Osama Bin Laden’s compound.
It was on May 2, 2011 that the CIA-led raid took place. During the raid, they killed Bin Laden. Bin Laden is the founder of Al-Qaeda, and was America’s most wanted terrorist. Al-Qaeda is the organization responsible for the September 11 attacks.
The CIA said in a report about the raid that the large quantity of material collected from the compound required time for a thorough review. Thus, this led a multi-agency task to catalog, analyze, and prioritize them for intelligence concerning al-Qa’ida’s intentions, affiliates, plans, and current threats.
Brian Drake is the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Science and Technology director of artificial intelligence. According to him, among those materials was a treasure trove of documents. Brian Drake spoke during a recent United States Department of Defense video conference.
The DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and NMEC (National Media Exploitation Center) worked with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, CIA, and others. Working together, they managed to collect important data.
NMEC’s mission is to take advantage of captured media from the field. Drake focused on this mission during the call.
Drake said during the conference call that when they do a raid, what was captured in that raid was then shipped over to their folks. Thus, an excellent example of that is with the Osama Bin Laden raid. He then added that they went through all those documents, and they discovered future plans that Al-Qaeda had. Moreover, they also got a glimpse at Bin Laden’s perspectives and so forth.
Bin Laden Example
NMEC has been investing in artificial intelligence for the last fifteen years.
Drake said that they had made investments by use of image and audio categorization, machine translation, object detection, and recognition technology. Thus, this allows them to go through petabytes of data that they get from document exploitation. Therefore, this resulted in tens of billions of pieces of data.
Moreover, what they have successfully done is deployed the capability to go through all those pieces of data. Then, they use the kind of insights they got from Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound raid and did so exceptionally quickly.
By doing that, they can alert and warn about things, like emerging plots or threats. Also, they can inform and notify themselves on mysteries that they did not understand before.
Paul Stanley is Chief Engineer for the Office of Information Technology Services. This is the IT component for the NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center). He discussed the machine learning, saying that a type of artificial intelligence is in use.
He said that, instead of piecemeal analysis, what they can do with machine learning is supervised machine learning.
They have got the corpus of data from years and years and years of human data exploitation. Drake said that it let them take the finding of that human exploitation and train a model. He wants to teach the model, so that as documents come in, it can give analysts a heads up that this could be relevant to them. Or that is something they do not care about.
Moreover, Drake added that just by doing something so simple, they had already seen a massive reduction in the amount of work.
