Artificial Intelligence: Transpiring Journey To Counter Terrorism – OpEd

Tenders for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the arena of counter-terrorism is one of the quickest developing segments of security programming. Artificial intelligence is essentially the intelligence of machines; it’s an area of computer sciences that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans.

A standout among the most critical applications of computerized reasoning is the gathering and processing of the collected data. One really cannot wage a conventional war against terrorism, yet a vital component for battling fear-based oppression in the words of Sun Tzu is great knowledge, that is to say a good intelligence. The finest way to ensure the protection of our assets and to detain terrorists is to comprehend what they are planning ahead of the execution of their plans. So, one of the central obstructions in this fight is not just the securing of the essential insights, but also that very capacity to process the majority of gathered information.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressively utilized as a part of a blend with physical reconnaissance. Rather than simply having a man watching a bank of security screens, an AI-upgraded CCTV framework cannot only spot potential issues itself, but also signals the security staff. These frameworks have been in utilization in cities like Chicago and London for quite a long time. However, the recognition abilities that many of these frameworks have are also to a certain degree helpful in fighting terrorism.

The gravest threats to the lives and liberties of humanity are the ones posed by terrorism and that too in its different manifestations; the relentless diffusion of deadly technologies allows progressively smaller groups to wreak increasingly greater destruction. Globalization has enhanced terrorists’ ability to travel, communicate, and transport weapons. Cyber Threat is the greatest threat to the national security of nation-states, as it appears now and in future; the framework of warfare is basically changing.

The establishment of everything contentious is on the web. Each familiar luxury we enjoy in the internet can be pivoted on us and utilized against us. At the point when the aim is there, a cyber-hacker may take our data freely to disturb and create fear practically identical to conventional terrorism or that particular hacker may also try to breach those Permissive Action Links (PALS) encrypted on the nuclear warheads.

Terrorists now are ‘embracing the web’ more than ever before. Fanatics of all brands are progressively using social media to recruit, radicalize and raise funds and the most adroit expert of this approach is the Islamic State (IS). They have been very fluent on social media. Similarly they are also now able to hide their identities using encryption tools which were once only available with the government agencies.

Furthermore, another vital problem here is the nature and form of the content being posted by these groups and that is usually ‘video’. While, photographs could easily be scanned, videos make screening and scanning a bit more problematical because of the different individual frames within. On Facebook alone, around 100 million videos are watched daily, which is a huge amount to moderate. The story does not end here; the aforementioned problem is amplified by copies and shared content, all of which can be re-posted even if the original is removed somehow.

However, to save millions of life from the jeopardy of terrorism and the aforesaid cyberspace problem, new tools must be developed and in the near future Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be managing the process. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zukerberg has asserted that incorporating AI into social media would help in distinguishing news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda. AI also uses image matching techniques, which allows the site to recognize and prevent the upload of terrorist propaganda images or videos that have previously been flagged. Likewise it is also experimenting with language understanding to recognize terrorist content through “text-based signals.”

The field of AI is progressing quickly and will keep on having numerous applications in the battle against dread or to say in the fight against terror. Currently, however, the progressions in these sorts of projects are not so prodigious that we can rely upon them to supplant humans who have the capacity to utilize rationale, but in the years to come AI would holistically revolutionize the security paradigm.

*Ubaid Ahmed currently working as Research Affiliate at SVI and can be reached at [email protected]