AI and the Future of Spying

The world is at a turning point for intelligence and national security. The explosion of the data available publicly, associated with artificial intelligence (AI), which is widely processed, is not limited to increasing intelligence work – it is redefined. Intelligence is no longer only about secrets. It comes to using data to know clearly, decide quickly, and first move in global technology race with profound geopolitical effects.

Today, unlike the 1947 world, the year of the establishment of the CIA, when the intelligence community members had to be fishermen to find hidden secrets. Instead, the data is now permeated our daily existence, and intelligence can be collected globally and widely in a digital environment. The game has changed under our feet. We are in the middle of renewable competition in the great powers, focusing on winning the future-AI technology race, quantum computing, and artificial biology. Mastering these technologies will form the geopolitical system in the next century.

History shows that typical transformations in technology and political geography require a relative shift in the American intelligence community: from a closed and classified model to one based on openness, speed and perception. In the midst of this transformation is an open source intelligence. Supported by artificial intelligence, Osint does not represent a supplement to traditional intelligence. It has become the basis.

First, Osint It must be framing as a national origin, especially since the data becomes a factor in production alongside the Earth, employment and capital in the era of artificial intelligence. Its applications go beyond industry, academic circles and government. Since its strength lies in access and transparency, OSint should be developed outside secret environments. For this reason it is called “open”.

However, many within the American intelligence community still treat OSINT as secondary. This is old thinking. With the vast majority of the world’s data that is now created in open digital environments, OSint should be the starting point for the analysis. The question is no longer “What are the secrets that we can discover?” But “What does the actually open field reveal?”

Some have suggested establishing an open source US intelligence agency. But this ignores an essential fact: the most valuable open source works are done Outside the government. To perceive OSINT potential, the United States must treat it as a national origin – not just a bureaucratic ability. This means building bridges between the public and the private, and not more walls inside the state. Instead, the private sector, where the real innovation in emerging technologies such as AI is lies, is in a much better position to lead the future of the United States in developing the tools restricted to pay the country’s intelligence capabilities and do so as colleagues running a national asset.

Moreover, the ability of private sector intelligence service providers to provide accurate, timely and suspended visions. More than a decade ago, in 2013, the Cyber ​​Security Company Mandanant was the first to discover the Chinese spy group Apt1. In 2016, Crowdstrike first defined Bear Fance Bear, Russian Piracy Group. A senior US intelligence official who occurs provided that his identity is not disclosed that about 95 percent of his previous work can be obtained through Osint.

Recently, the relatively high skills teams such as those in Dow Chemical, for example, managed to openly and commercially available data to predict the full invasion of Russia in Ukraine in February 2022-in the health of many national countries that have participated directly. Its capabilities have not improved, access to intelligence, and the difference only in the years, as companies deepen investment in these tools and their adoption in rapid transformations in political geography.

The least estimated is a parallel revolution that occurs in the fight against espionage. This process, led by artificial intelligence equally, has just started. As with intelligence in general, the private sector, not governments, will drive the anti -spying industry suitable for the purpose in the era of information.

The American intelligence community was built to confront the Soviet Union – a world of secrets, not sensors. It has evolved, but its structures and culture are still rooted in another era. Traditionally, intelligence meant the collection of confidential information, which was analyzed and then published to decision makers. In the last century, until the early years of this century, intelligence requires government resources to withdraw – to reveal the secrets that opponents do not want to discover. And because the intelligence concerned is secrets, it requires – as a definition – a means of assembly.

Today, the new digital environment offers huge quantities of information that, in the hands of the right data scientists, can be analyzed skillfully to detect unintentionally visions. This is what Bellingcat has been skilled in a deliberate manner, and revealed malicious secret activities of the Russian government that were before, in the former digital world, exhausting tasks for Western intelligence services.

Instead of paying attention to secrets, today, this must be taken into account in a broader national framework: it is related to providing advantages to decision makers. Intelligence is now about data: who carries it; Whoever controls it and those who can treat it efficiently, using machine learning and AI, to collect visions that enable accuracy at work. Everyone who can achieve the latter will be the masters of this century.

If our understanding of intelligence changes in front of our eyes, then this is also the fight against spying. The latter can be more understood as procedures aimed at defending foreign intelligence offers. One part of the anti-espionage is an anti-spies, in a popular language-but it is much broader, including activities that aim to face misinformation and even anti-terrorism activities and counter-activities. The anti -espionage is one of the widest areas of intelligence, as it touches all parts of the target threat surface, whether it is governmental or private sector, for the simple reason is that any part of this surface can fall prey to a hostile foreigner.

Once again, in the last century, the anti-espionage was the field of governments-concerned with the government in exchange for government work, and the national state against the nation-state. This is not the way to spy today. Companies stand on the front lines along with governments in the spy game that supports technology today.

To understand the previous essence of combating cancellation, think about non -Muslim work, but the primary for British intelligence officers described in John Le Carey’s novels. It included fine paper works and cross files, and often descended into activities that exceed the mind such as searching for a foreign phone guide in the opposite direction to find the required name attached with a phone number. As part of the intelligence services in Britain, there were real life officers similar to the Le Carré’s Connie Sachs, who had knowledge of the Soviet espionage.

In the world of digital intelligence that reveals in front of us today, SACHS will be of artificial intelligence, data processing in actual time, actual time. While society works to integrate artificial intelligence and open capabilities, progress is restricted to classification, bureaucracy and cultural resistance. The secrecy is still the world currency.

To understand The challenge to combat unstable cancellation facing the United States is necessary to estimate how to understand the People’s Republic of China, the main strategic threat to the United States, intelligence.

China uses a complete approach to collecting intelligence, using all available means, individuals and resources to steal Western military, commercial and industrial data. It does this in achieving a major strategy, which was explicitly announced by the Secretary -General of the Communist Party of China (CCP), and aims to jump before the United States and becomes the world’s leading military and economic power.

To achieve Xi’s goal of “national renewal”, CCP mixes military and civil power and excludes a little discrimination between military and civilian targets in the West. Using increased authoritarian legislation that was approved by eleventh, CCP has explicitly allowed its intelligence services to steal intellectual property from Western goals that cannot be developed by local Chinese talents. The emerging techniques that will form humanity this century, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and vital engineering, and thus lies directly in Beijing scenes.

CCP does not necessarily steal the secrets – collects data of all types, some are a secret, and some are hidden in sight. This is where artificial intelligence will prove that it is very useful for the party – it is only through Amnesty International that the Chinese state is able to collect visions from the huge amount of data that has already seized and continued to steal, and storing this gear in collective data centers that were created throughout the country to contract local and foreign data. We can witness that the US -Chinese trade war, which was re -launched in April, has only intensified the Chinese theft of American intellectual property as CCP tries to evade the imposed commercial barriers.

The western branching of the public and private sectors, from the intelligence perspective, is the contact that the opponents of the United States such as China systematically exploit. On its own, the American government cannot face the intelligence crime in China, given its model for all societies, which benefits from the activities of the gray region, such as employing scientists or engineers within American companies to steal intellectual property. As of 2022, the FBI opened a new investigation linked to China every 12 hours. Before his retirement as the FBI director in January, Christopher Rai warned that China had stolen personal data and US companies more than any other combined country.

In response, a private sector Anti -cavity The industry is already formed, as companies raise their threats and security operations from the inside to address the threats of the nation -state. In January, the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the Podcast Joe Rogan, and among other topics, the work of the anti -spy teams in Meta. Zuckerberg described their work as including determining when platforms such as Facebook are used by harmful actors.

It is not just the definition to follow the work of anti -espionage. From writing these lines, many job openings can be identified in leading technology companies that are essentially interested in combating equipment – in Apple, Openai, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Acceneture, Crowdstrike, Twitter/X. Each large technical company adopts this model.

It is not surprising that the United States government is moving more slowly. While the CIA, which was established in 1947, underwent periodic bureaucratic updates over the years, the primary DNA is still the same as it was almost eight decades before. If you want to imagine a suitable intelligence society for the twenty -first century, many goals themselves will share it, but its shape will be completely different.

Meanwhile, given the pace of change and geopolitical risks facing the United States, Washington should already strengthen the technology industry’s ability to police and respond to the state’s national spy.

The intelligence race is already – and the winners will not be those who store the secrets. They will be those who make fun of data, use artificial intelligence, and cooperate. This is not just a transformation from Tradecraft. It is a redesign of the intelligence itself. The United States should be led.