Counterterrorism magazine’s website posted my latest Threatcon column.
You can read the column via the below link or the below text:
On October 17th, there was an historic meeting of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agency chiefs.
The
chiefs of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership - the United States, the
United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - traveled to the U.S. at
the invitation of FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The Five Eyes partnership grew from a 1946
agreement after the end of World War II to share intelligence and coordinate
security efforts. The five member countries have a long history of trust and
cooperation, and they share a commitment to common values.
As
reported by the FBI, the Five Eyes leaders launched the first Emerging
Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California in
the heart of Silicon Valley. In addition to the Five Eyes, the summit also had
in attendance, business leaders, government representatives, and members of
academia who discussed threats to innovation, and how to work together to
advance both economic security and public safety.
The
summit offered a “fireside chat” with all five chiefs and hosted by former Secretary
of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice. The intelligence chiefs spoke of current threats
to private sector organizations in their respective countries, and there were later
closed-door discussions
with the intelligence chiefs and members from the private sector about the
threats posed by China and emerging technologies.
During the fireside chat FBI Director
Christopher Wray called the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the foremost threat
to global innovation and stated that partnerships are the best way to fight
back.
"There is no greater threat to
innovation than the Chinese government, and it is a measure of how seriously
the five of us and our services take that threat that we have chosen to come
together to try to highlight that, raise awareness, raise resilience, and work
closely with the private sector to try to build better protection for
innovation—especially in a place like Northern California, but, really, across
all five of our countries," Wray said.
Wray also spoke of the FBI’s commitment
to collaborating with Five Eyes and private sector partners to safeguard
emerging technologies from theft and exploitation—including the potential
misuse of artificial intelligence.
“I think I speak for all of my
colleagues that everybody wants to be on the right side of this,” Rice said
during the discussion. “We want to do so in accordance with our values, with
the way that we've innovated over the years. But there are very few people any
longer who are blind to what the People’s Republic of China is doing.”
Wray said the threat posed by the CCP was
unique due to its scale and scope. He likened it to a web, every strand of
which became more brazen and more dangerous.
Wray went on to say that the Chinese
government has a long track record of simultaneously hurling a multitude of
tactics at its economic espionage targets. According to Wray, the tactics range
from online hacks and human intelligence operations to business dealings that
may seem benign but actually further the party’s aims.
"At the same time, we've seen
aggressive uses of human intelligence now powered by professional social media,
while China also hides information about its own companies and harasses and
arrests foreign professionals to make it harder and harder for our businesses
to detect and avoid harmful investments, joint ventures and other transactions
intended to facilitate the theft of their IP and data," Wray said.
Wray also noted that China has the
largest hacking program of any nation-state, and the Communist Chinese program
intentionally targeted organizations with large customer bases so it can rob
hundreds or thousands of victims at once. China’s new aim, Wray said, was to
utilize stolen AI technology to further bolster its hacking efforts, an effort
he called outrageous.
According to Wray, when choosing their targets,
the Chinese doesn’t discriminate between new and veteran companies, rural or
big-city settings, or a focus on a singular industrial sector when it chooses
its targets for economic espionage and tech theft.
"We have found that, more often
than not, the answer to the question, 'Is this a technology they're targeting?'
is 'Yes,'" he said. “Over the last several years, the Bureau has witnessed
an approximately 1300% uptick in the number of investigations that are somehow
related to Chinese attempts to pilfer intellectual property, trade secrets, or
similar intelligence,” Wray said.
Whether
technology theft occurs through traditional spying or nefarious cyber means,
the aftershocks of technology theft can be felt both on Wall Street and Main
Street, Wray noted. The FBI director illustrated this dual impact by pointing
to the example of a wind turbine company whose intellectual property was stolen
by China, leading to both a market-gap plummet and mass layoffs.
Ken
McCallum, the British Director General of MI5, added, “You don’t need to be
working at a billion-dollar company or be the dean of a prestigious college to
end up on the CCP’s radar, because, in 2023, if you’re anywhere close to the
cutting edge of tech, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics
is interested in you."
The Five
Eyes partners unveiled “Five Principles to Secure Innovation” - Five
Eyes launches the Five Principles of Secure Innovation (npsa.gov.uk). These principles, according to the FBI, were
crafted by the Bureau’s U.K. partners but will be implemented across the Five
Eyes coalition, including understanding how bad actors can illicitly obtain
technology that doesn’t belong to them and securing one’s environment,
products, partnerships, and growth.
"Those
bits of guidance are co-created with people in the sectors to be pragmatic, to
be workable, to avoid stifling the very openness and innovation that you're
trying to protect in the first place," said MI5 Director General Ken
McCallum during the summit.
The FBI, specifically, is also fighting
the tide of stolen innovation through constant contact between the Bureau's 56
field offices and industry, investigations, disruption of Chinese attempts to
steal intelligence, and by sharing lessons learned from private sector
partnerships,
Wray also soke of risks posed by
artificial intelligence.
"We
worry about AI as an amplifier for all sorts of misconduct," Wray said. “I
anticipate AI making existing bad actors even more dangerous.”
Wary added
that AI can be used in a multitude of malicious ways. It can be used to detect
vulnerabilities, craft code, perform advanced spearphishing, or even make
virtual kidnappings more believable by mimicking the voices of children who’ve
allegedly been taken.
Wray also
expressed concern about the potential for China to use stolen personal and
corporate data to train up pilfered AI technology and make its looted machine
learning models even stronger.
“But it can
also be exploited by would-be terrorists,” Wray warned.
"Among
the ways in which AI can be misused in the terror space, we’ve seen people
essentially using AI to circumvent safeguards built into some of the AI
infrastructure that some of these companies have built to do searches for, you
know, how to build a bomb, for example, or ways to obfuscate their searches for
how to build a bomb," he said. "We’ve seen AI used to essentially
amplify the distribution or dissemination of terrorist propaganda, you know,
for example, putting it into other languages in a way that’s more coherent and
more credible to potential supporters."
Wray noted
that private sector partnerships were vital to countering this misuse of
emerging technology so that companies can implement appropriate safeguards for
how their innovation can be used.
He said that
the FBI is "acutely attuned" to the risk faced by Silicon
Valley-based AI companies.
Wray labelled
the Chinese government the "number one threat to innovation," arguing
it had made economic espionage a central component of its national
strategy.
"The
FBI have, over the last several years, had about a 1,300 per cent increase in
investigations that are, in one way or another, related to attempts to steal
intellectual property or other secrets by some form of the Chinese government,
or some arm of the Chinese government," Wray said. "It wasn't that
long ago, when I checked, we were opening a new investigation, again,
specifically focused on China and its efforts to steal intellectual property
and other secrets, about every 12 hours."
Paul Davis’ Threatcon column covers crime, espionage and terrorism.
No comments:
Post a Comment