Spy agencies are caught in a "technology arms race" with terrorists and criminals, the new head of Britain's MI6 said on Monday in his first public comments since becoming chief.
Alex Younger defended the use of data by the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, after the release of documents by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden sparked criticism of sweeping mass surveillance by intelligence agencies.
"Using data appropriately and proportionately offers us a priceless opportunity to be even more deliberate and targeted in what we do, and so to be better at protecting our agents and this country," Younger said.
"The bad news is the same technology in opposition hands, an opposition often unconstrained by consideration of ethics and law, allows them to see what we are doing and to put our people and agents at risk," he said.
"So we find ourselves in a technology arms race."
The U.S. Air Force’s fleet of drones and manned spy planes recorded nearly 50 days’ worth of surveillance video every 24 hours in 2012, according to one former top official.
The video comprised a portion of the roughly 1.3 million megabytes of data that the Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency gathered daily, then-lieutenant general Larry James said at an industry event in April 2012.
Today James works for NASA.
The general’s remarks—and other surprising insights into the Air Force’s spying efforts—are included in the ISR Agency’s official history for 2012, a heavily-redacted copy of which War Is Boring obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In the two years since James revealed the extent of the flying branch’s aerial spying, the Air Force has changed significantly—retiring many aircraft and adding others, all in line with the Pentagon’s shifting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war zones.
But it’s unlikely the aerial spies are less busy today than they were in 2012.
The increasing availability of big data from mobile phones and location-based apps has triggered a revolution in the understanding of human mobility patterns. This data shows the ebb and flow of the daily commute in and out of cities, the pattern of travel around the world and even how disease can spread through cities via their transport systems.
So there is considerable interest in looking more closely at human mobility patterns to see just how well it can be predicted and how these predictions might be used in everything from disease control and city planning to traffic forecasting and location-based advertising.
Today we get an insight into the kind of detailed that is possible thanks to the work of Zimo Yang at Microsoft research in Beijing and a few pals. These guys start with the hypothesis that people who live in a city have a pattern of mobility that is significantly different from those who are merely visiting. By dividing travellers into locals and non-locals, their ability to predict where people are likely to visit dramatically improves
In the never-ending quest to get computers to process, really understand and actually reason, scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to look more deeply into how computers can mimic a key portion of our brain.
The military's advanced research group recently put out a call, or Request For information, on how it could develop systems that go beyond machine learning, Bayesian techniques, and graphical technology to solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time."
Current systems offer partial solutions to this problem, but are limited in their ability to efficiently scale to larger more complex datasets, DARPA said. "They are also compute intensive, exhibit limited parallelism, require high precision arithmetic, and, in most cases, do not account for temporal data. "
What DARPA is interested in is looking at mimicking a portion of the brain known as the neocortex which is utilized in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. Specfically, DARPA said it is looking for information that provides new concepts and technologies for developing what it calls a "Cortical Processor" based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
