Were they not using AI and ML techniques before? Or is this announcement just indicating that they are going to put a greater emphasis on deep learning? I have trouble seeing how the NSA would function without ML techniques, for example.
It's also not clear how a lot of the classical ML can be translated into a DL setting- a lot of graph analysis [1] is traditionally solved using matrix factorisation, for instance, which doesn't directly translate into deep learning. You can find different ways of doing it with DL, but it's not as transferable.
[1]: e.g. analysing an individual's social graph. I believe that Facebook uses a lot of classical techniques, like PCA. I've heard that Facebook has been pouring a lot of money into research that uses DL on arbitrary graphs.
Government pioneered, or pushed contractors to pioneer, lots of technologies - just think about NASA.
I'm pretty sure that, with their budget, the NSA is at the forefront of technologies that can be used in their field, but they obviously don't want to disclose what they do. Adopting a publicly available technology shouldn't be difficult at all.
Analysis, and particularly extraction of actionable intelligence, is the key challenge. They have lots of analysts, for sure. But organizing and integrating their output has been a slow process. Reports, summaries of reports, summaries of summaries, etc.
So yeah, they want godlike AI ;)
I doubt the training data/AI will be accountable or visible to the citizens (yes, the analyst gets fired/van'd, but someone else takes his place).
So we're trusting the intel agencies, but they're trusting an AI to some extent. They're plainly not dumb enough to let the AI drive, but it still plays a part.
I'm not worried about an AI being able to sift data given a training set to some degree of accuracy. I'm more worried about the training set as a dark way of generating actionable intelligence, for good or bad purposes.
I'm curious about your personal experience of the benefits and costs of AI in intelligence? It seems unlikely that you will have been on the receiving end of the full potential cost of that AI.
Sure, if you believe that a radical increase in capacity to surveil everyone and exert overwhelming violence against anyone with absolute obedience would certainly never be used to destroy the lives of politically inconvenient people and tear innocents off to torture or extrajudicial assassinations, I guess it's all sunshine and fluffy bunnies.