UNITED STATES
The US Department of Defense is piloting an artificial intelligence (AI) project that aims to detect “micro changes” in the behaviour of people with top-secret clearance.
The US military evaluates hundreds of thousands of people for their ability to protect the nation’s secrets; now the Defense Security Service (DSS) believes AI and machine learning can help.
Its pilot project aims to sift and apply massive amounts of data on people who hold or are seeking security clearances.
The goal is not just to detect employees who have betrayed their trust, but to predict which ones might — allowing problems to be resolved with calm conversation rather than punishment.
The pilot is based on an urgent need.
In June, the Department took over the task of working through a security clearance backlog of more than 600,000 people.
Some of the clearances have been waiting for more than a year.
The delays stem from an antiquated system that involves mailing questionnaires to former places of employment, sometimes including summer jobs held during an applicant’s adolescence, waiting (and hoping) for a response, and scanning the returned paper document into a mainframe database of the sort that existed before cloud computing.
The effort to create a new way to gauge potential employees’ risk is being led by Technical Director of Research and Development at DSS, Mark Nehmer (pictured), who said early results could be expected later in the year.
“The Department of Defense already does some digital user activity monitoring, but the pilot seeks a lot more information than is currently the norm,” Mr Nehmer said.
“We are putting this into a construct so that we can detect minute changes in behaviour across an entire pattern of life, so that we can detect stress.”
Washington, DC, 1 April 2019
