Friday, February 28, 2020

●● Asymmetric Warfare, Cyberwar ◊

⧫⧫ ..

⧫ AI, IT, Cyber ..⧫ Bioweapons ..
⧫ Budgets ..

AI & Cyberthreats

22-1-23 How Governments Fund Cyberattacks - VisPol > .
24-4-15 AI Deception: How Tech Companies Are [Scamming Investors] - ColdF > .
24-2-19 AI Played Wargames - Result Not Reassuring - Sabine > .
24-1-6 R-U War: First Сyberwar in History 1 - UA > .
23-9-24 Combat Drones & Future Air Warfare - Humans + Wingman - Perun > .
23-9-30 Internet Backbone = Hidden Infrastructure - B1M > .
23-8-29 Major FBI Operation Targeted Qakbot Botnet - Director Wray > .
23-8-18 AI Origins to Catastrophism vs Optimism - gtbt > .
23-5-6 Artificial Intelligence: What's next? - Sabine Hossenfelder > .
23-3-3 Generative AI, ChatGPT, CG Art: Future of Work - Patrick Boyle > . skip > .
22-9-29 Is Your Laptop's Microphone Spying On You? - Seytonic > .
22-9-29 Pegasus: The Most Dangerous Virus In The World - Tech > .
22-8-6 Pegasus Spyware Leaks - Seytonic > .
22-6-21 Understanding R-U War (16) - Technology c Lucia Velasco > .
22-4-25 Ronan Farrow: How Democracies Spy on their Citizens | A&Co > .
22-4-19 How Cyberwarfare Actually Works (Stuxnet +) - Wendover > .
22-3-25 Cyberwarfare during/outset of Russian Invasion of Ukraine - nwyt > .
22-2-24 Pegasus: Israel's Spy system has Scandalized the World - VisPol > .

⧫ R&D ..
⧫ Surveillance, Spyware ..
⧫ Wargaming, Hypothetical Warfare ..

UK spies will need artificial intelligence - Rusi report: UK spies will need to use artificial intelligence (AI) to counter a range of threats, according to a report based on unprecedented access to British intelligence. Adversaries are likely to use the technology for attacks in cyberspace and on the political system, and AI will be needed to detect and stop them. 

The future threats could include using AI to develop deep fakes - where a computer can learn to generate convincing faked video of a real person - in order to manipulate public opinion and elections. It might also be used to mutate malware for cyber-attacks, making it harder for normal systems to detect - or even to repurpose and control drones to carry out attacks. In such cases, AI will be needed to counter AI.

AI is unlikely to predict who might be about to be involved in serious crimes, such as terrorism - and will not replace human judgement. Acts such as terrorism are too infrequent to provide sufficiently large historical datasets to look for patterns - they happen far less often than other criminal acts, such as burglary.

Even within that data set, the background and ideologies of the perpetrators vary so much that it is hard to build a model of a terrorist profile. There are too many variables to make prediction straightforward, with new events potentially being radically different from previous ones.

In practice, in fields like counter-terrorism, the report argues that "augmented" - rather than artificial - intelligence will be the norm - where technology helps human analysts sift through and prioritise increasingly large amounts of data, allowing humans to make their own judgements.

The Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think tank also argues that the use of AI could give rise to new privacy and human-rights considerations, which will require new guidance. Any kind of profiling could also be discriminatory and lead to new human-rights concerns.

One of the thorny legal and ethical questions for spy agencies, especially since the Edward Snowden revelations, is how justifiable it is to collect large amounts of data from ordinary people in order to sift it and analyse it to look for those who might be involved in terrorism or other criminal activity. A related question concerns how far privacy is violated when data is collected and analysed by a machine versus when a human sees it.

Privacy advocates fear that artificial intelligence will require collecting and analysing far larger amounts of data from ordinary people, in order to understand and search for patterns, that create a new level of intrusion. The authors of the report believe new rules will be needed.


AI Weaponry

.
24-4-5 Israel's Lavender System, AI Targeting, Battlefield Informatics - McBeth > .

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), AI algorithms,




Biden urged to back AI weapons to counter China and Russia threats

The US and its allies should reject calls for a global ban on AI-powered autonomous weapons systems, according to an official report commissioned for the American President and Congress. It says that artificial intelligence will "compress decision time frames" and require military responses humans cannot make quickly enough alone. And it warns Russia and China would be unlikely to keep to any such treaty. [Yup! WW2 demonstrated that belligerents take advantage of appeasers, and the CCP and Kremlin have repeatedly proved untrustworthy.]

Critics, such as Prof Noel Sharkey, spokesman for the Campaign To Stop Killer Robots, claim the proposals risk driving an "irresponsible" arms race, which could lead to the "proliferation of AI weapons making decisions about who to kill." [Unfortunately, China and Russia are as unlikely to honor the terms of a ban as Hitler and Stalin were likely to honor the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.]

The report counters that if autonomous weapons systems have been properly tested and are authorised for use by a human commander, then they should be consistent with International Humanitarian Law.

Much of the 750-page report focuses on how to counter China's ambition to be a world leader in AI by 2030. It says that senior military leaders have warned the US could "lose its military-technical superiority in the coming years" if China leapfrogs it by adopting AI-enabled systems more quickly - for example by using swarming drones to attack the US Navy.

The report predicts AI will transform "all aspects of military affairs", and talks of rival algorithms battling it out in the future. Although it warns that badly-designed AI systems could increase the risk of war, it adds that "defending against AI-capable adversaries without employing AI is an invitation to disaster". It does, however, draw the line at nuclear weapons, saying these should still require the explicit authorisation of the president. 

The report maintains that the White House should press Moscow and Beijing to issue public commitments of their own over this matter.

Not all the report's proposals focus on the military, suggesting that the US's non-defence spending on AI-related research and development be doubled to reach $32bn (£23bn) a year by 2026.

Other proposals include:
  • creating a new body to help the president guide the US's wider AI policies
  • relaxing immigration laws to help attract talent from abroad, including an effort to increase a "brain drain" from China
  • creating a new university to train digitally-talented civil servants
  • accelerating the adoption of new technologies by the US's intelligence agencies
The report also focuses on the US's need to restrict China's ability to manufacture state-of-the-art computer chips. It advises that the US must keep at least two generations ahead of China's micro-electronics manufacturing capabilities. To do this, it says the government needs to offer large tax credits to companies which build new chip fabrication plants on US soil.

President Biden has already ordered a review of the US semiconductor industry, and last week pledged support for a $37bn plan by Congress to boost local output.

The report contends that export restrictions need to be put in place to prevent China being able to import the photolithography machines required to make the most advanced types of chips with the smallest transistors. This, it says, will require the co-operation of the governments of the Netherlands and Japan, whose companies specialise in these tools.

China's semiconductor-makers have been seeking out second-hand photolithography equipment to do this, buying up as much as 90% of available stock, according to a report in Nikkei Asia. However, these older machines are not capable of producing the most advanced chips, which are prized for use in both the latest smartphones and other consumer gadgets, as well as military applications.

In addition, the report says US firms that export chips to China should be compelled to certify they are not used to "facilitate human rights abuses", and should submit quarterly reports to the Department of Commerce listing all chip sales to China. This follows allegations that chips from American firms Intel and Nvidia were used to conduct mass surveillance against China's Uighur ethnic minority in its Xinjiang region.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Belarus↔(Russia)→Lithuania, Poland, EU


For > Poland Military >>, the migration crisis triggered by Belarus is the first tangible experience of the period of chaos that comes with the collapse of the unipolar order we have known so far. For the Polish authorities, this is the end of the geostrategic sleep in which they have been for the last 30 years. 

00:00 Intro
00:45 Border Crisis
05:55 Information Warfare
13:45 The End of Strategic Sleep
17:35 Outro

Geostrategic Projection
Belarus↔(Russia)→Lithuania, Poland, EU ..

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...