Jim Baker on AI and Counterintelligence
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2018
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
The United States has become the global leader in both defense and private-sector AI. Inevitably, this has led to an environment in which adversary and ally governments alike may seek to identify and steal AI information—in other words, AI has become intelligence, and those who work in AI have become potential sources and assets. And with intelligence, comes counterintelligence.
Jim Baker, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former FBI General Counsel, is part-way through a series of essays for Lawfare on the links between counterintelligence and AI, two parts of which have already been published. On Monday, Jim sat down with Benjamin Wittes to discuss his work on the subject. They talked about how to understand AI as an intelligence asset, how we might protect this valuable asset against a range of threats from hostile foreign actors, and how we can protect ourselves against the threat from AI in the hands of adversaries.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | I do think it has to be a priority. |
| 0:36.0 | And, you know, we're still in a post-9-11 world. |
| 0:40.0 | And the FBI and other government agencies are rightly focused on terrorism. |
| 0:44.0 | It's terrorism hasn't gone away. It's something we should be worried about. |
| 0:47.0 | But as a result, sometimes counterintelligence takes a back seat to counter terrorism. |
| 0:53.0 | And, okay, fine, I get that. I understand that. |
| 0:57.0 | I don't think that's necessarily the right choice all the time. |
| 1:00.0 | And what I'm trying to say is that from a counterintelligence perspective, |
| 1:05.0 | from a national security perspective, |
| 1:08.0 | we need to pay attention to what's going on in the AI world. |
| 1:11.0 | And we need to think deeply about the threats because they're quite significant. |
| 1:16.0 | They're potentially quite significant. |
| 1:18.0 | And it is worth investing the time, effort, energy, money to make sure that we're doing what we need to do to protect those assets. |
| 1:26.0 | I'm Mikhail Afogal, and this is the Law Fair Podcast September 25, 2018. |
| 1:33.0 | The US has become the global leader in both defense and private sector artificial intelligence. |
| 1:38.0 | Inevitably, this has led to an environment in which adversary and ally governments alike |
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