The U.S. intelligence community (IC) on Thursday rolled out an "ethics guide" and framework for how intelligence agencies can responsibly develop and use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Among the key ethical requirements were shoring up security, respecting human dignity through complying with existing civil rights and privacy laws, rooting out bias to ensure AI use is "objective and equitable," and ensuring human judgement is incorporated into AI development and use. The IC wrote in the framework, which digs into the details of the ethics guide, that it was intended to ensure that use of AI technologies matches "the Intelligence Community's unique mission purposes, authorities, and responsibilities for collecting and using data and AI outputs." "The IC leads in developing and using technology crucial to our national security mission, and we cannot do so without recognizing and acting on its ethical implications," Director of National Intelligence John RatcliffeJohn Lee RatcliffeRubio says congressional oversight of intelligence faces'historic crisis' following DNI announcement Warner calls Intelligence chief's decision to scale down congressional election security briefings'outrageous' Pelosi, Schiff pan director of national intelligence for canceling election security briefings MORE said in a statement Thursday. "These principles and their accompanying framework will help guide our mission leads and data scientists as they implement technology to solve intelligence problems."

The U.S. intelligence community released artificial intelligence principles and an ethics framework on Thursday to ensure that intel organizations are safely and legally developing AI systems as the technology quickly evolves. The long-awaited principles and framework, released in two separate documents by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are meant to outline the intelligence community's broad values and guidance for the ethical development of AI. The accompanying six-page framework, with 10 stated objectives, is meant to put "meat on the bones" of the stated principles, Ben Huebner, chief of ODNI's Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency, said Thursday on a call with reporters. Huebner said there are a series of questions that practitioners within the 17 intelligence agencies should consider when developing AI. It's a tool, and it's a tool that provides the intelligence community with a consistent approach" to artificial intelligence, Huebner said. The intelligence community is a massive conglomerate of agencies, each tasked with a specific intelligence mission, making it difficult to verify the implementation of these ethics considerations. To ease oversight challenges, a critical piece of the framework calls on AI users in the intel community to adequately document information about the AI technology under development. That would include explanations on the AI's intended use, its design, its limitations, related data sets and changes to its algorithm over time. Asked how ODNI will verify that AI projects at intelligence agencies under its purview are following the framework and principles, Huebner pointed to the documentation guidance that could then be accessible by legal counsels, inspectors general, and privacy and civil liberties officers. By giving us your email, you are opting in to the C4ISRNET Daily Brief. "One of the things I think you see throughout particularly the ethics framework is the incorporation of best practices to allow the folks [in] the oversight community ... the tools they'll need to conduct that oversight," Huebner said. The framework is just the first iteration of ODNI's ethics framework. Huebner told reporters to expect further iterations of the framework as the intel community learns more about the use cases for AI, and as the technology itself matures. Dean Souleles, who runs ODNI's Augmenting Intelligence through Machines Innovation Hub, told reporters that within ODNI's working groups, they are "actively" developing different standards for future use cases. "It is too early to define a long list of dos and don'ts," Souleles said. "We need to understand how this technology works.

Then-Rep John Ratcliffe visited the DHS' National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in 2016, as part of a roll-out of automated cyber tools. ALBUQUERQUE -- Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released what the first take on an evolving set of principles for the ethical use of artificial intelligence. The six principles, ranging from privacy to transparency to cybersecurity, are described as Version 1.0, approved by DNI John Ratcliffe last month. The six principles are pitched as a guide for the nation's many intelligence especially, especially to help them work with the private companies that will build AI for the government. As such, they provide an explicit complement to the Pentagon's AI principles put forth by Defense Secretary Mark Esper back in February.

America's intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSA's regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it -- analysts, policy-makers and leaders -- must better understand how advanced AI systems reach their conclusions. Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI's year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn't allowed to discuss everything that he's doing, but he could talk about a few examples.

Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that's what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI? Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI. "You cannot build a house without a solid foundation. The foundation of AI is data and computational technology," Souleles said. "The intelligence community has spent much of the last decade on a program we call ICITE, the information technology enterprise of the IC. And that's been about modernizing the technology infrastructure. And that is about getting cloud technology throughout the community, making basic computational capability available to our technologists just as it is in the private sector. But that's not good enough, because the new era of computation requires sophisticated kinds of computing. We talk about GPUs, graphical processing units, or tensor processing units (TPUs), or neuromorphic chips or field programmable gate arrays, or any of the wide variety of things that are the specialized computation that enable AI computation. And we need to make the investments in those things."

Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that's what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI? Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI. "You cannot build a house without a solid foundation. The foundation of AI is data and computational technology," Souleles said. "The intelligence community has spent much of the last decade on a program we call ICITE, the information technology enterprise of the IC. And that's been about modernizing the technology infrastructure. And that is about getting cloud technology throughout the community, making basic computational capability available to our technologists just as it is in the private sector. But that's not good enough, because the new era of computation requires sophisticated kinds of computing. We talk about GPUs, graphical processing units, or tensor processing units (TPUs), or neuromorphic chips or field programmable gate arrays, or any of the wide variety of things that are the specialized computation that enable AI computation. And we need to make the investments in those things."

BILLINGTON CYBERSECURITY SUMMIT: Artificial Intelligence has a big big-data problem when it comes to network defense, senior defense officials warned this afternoon. Sure, AI can pounce on a problem in a microsecond, long before a human operator can react. All you need to do is train the machine-learning algorithms. So you let the AI prowl through every computer, smartphone, server, router, Internet connection, etc. until the algorithm learns what normal looks like on your network. Then the AI can sit back and watch every passing bit and byte, ready to jump on any anomalous activity from malware slipping in as an email attachment to a disgruntled employee downloading all your sensitive files, Edward Snowden-style.

BILLINGTON CYBERSECURITY SUMMIT: Artificial Intelligence has a big big-data problem when it comes to network defense, senior defense officials warned this afternoon. Sure, AI can pounce on a problem in a microsecond, long before a human operator can react. All you need to do is train the machine-learning algorithms. So you let the AI prowl through every computer, smartphone, server, router, Internet connection, etc. until the algorithm learns what normal looks like on your network. Then the AI can sit back and watch every passing bit and byte, ready to jump on any anomalous activity from malware slipping in as an email attachment to a disgruntled employee downloading all your sensitive files, Edward Snowden-style.