Spy agencies have high hopes for AI

WHEN IT comes to using artificial intelligence (AI), intelligence agencies have been at it longer than most. In the cold war America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) explored early AI to help transcribe and translate the enormous volumes of Soviet phone-intercepts they began hoovering up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet the technology was immature. One former European intelligence officer says his service did not use automatic transcription or translation in Afghanistan in the 2000s, relying on native speakers instead. Now the spooks are hoping to do better. The trends that have made AI attractive for business in recent years—more data, better algorithms, and more processing power to make it all hum—are giving spy agencies big ideas, too.

On February 24th GCHQ published a paper on how AI might change its work. “Machine-assisted fact-checking” could help spot faked images, check disinformation against trusted sources and identify social-media bots that spread it. AI might block cyber-attacks by “analysing patterns of activity on networks and devices”, and fight organised crime by spotting suspicious chains of financial transactions.

Other, less well-resourced organisations have already shown what is possible. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, an American NGO,...