A Week in #Intelligence - W6 - 2023 - #ExMergere - #OSINT #Analysis #AI #Strategic #Cyber #Criminal #Services
Pierre Memheld
AI/Data for Human Analysts, Anti-Corruption @Falcon-Horizon-EU, Global Companies Support, Competitive Intelligence & Due Diligence
???????????Headline
?????????????Chinese Balloon Had Western-Made Parts With English Writing, Lawmakers Told - Bloomberg
-?????????An alleged Chinese spy balloon that traversed the US had western-made components with English-language writing on them, members of Congress were told on Capitol Hill Thursday, people familiar with the matter said.
???????????Studies
-?????????Researchers in the rapidly growing field of intelligence studies face unique and difficult challenges ranging from finding and accessing data on secret activities, to sorting through the politics of intelligence successes and failures, to making sense of complex socio-organizational or psychological phenomena. The contributing authors to Researching National Security Intelligence survey the state of the field and demonstrate how incorporating multiple disciplines helps to generate high-quality, policy-relevant research. Following this approach, the volume provides a conceptual, empirical, and methodological toolkit for scholars and students informed by many disciplines: history, political science, public administration, psychology, communications, and journalism. This collection of essays written by an international group of scholars and practitioners propels intelligence studies forward by demonstrating its growing depth, by suggesting new pathways to the creation of knowledge, and by identifying how scholarship can enhance practice and accountability.
–???????????This article is the first systematic attempt that combines the analysis of the vulnerabilities to which the Iranian intelligence services have been exposed in the last decades and the ways and methods of Israel’s intelligence—most and foremost, the Mossad—to exploit them. In particular, four factors have been looked into (i.e., rivalries between various players of the political establishment and intelligence agencies, regime fragility, tense geopolitical environment, and increased complexity due to adversaries’ tradecraft sophistication). Examined through the lens of the concept of reflexive control and substantiated by numerous examples available in the public domain, the article seeks to advance our understanding of the dynamics of clandestine intelligence operations in the Middle East.
?????????????Europe’s decade of the spy – POLITICO
–???????????American moles of the 1980s are well-known amongst intelligence scholars — and they may soon be joined by equally infamous European traitors.
–???????????While much-discussed desired qualities of an intelligence analyst count for a big part of their professional skills, the development of the analyst, their professional profile (general analyst profile [GAP]), during their career is often overlooked in academic discussions. As part of professional experiences, tasking has an important effect on development. The level of intelligence synthesis, informative and advisory nature of the Intelligence Community, and available human resources are three organizational factors that can be used to study the requirements and career-spanning effects tasking has for an analyst and their manager. Ultimately, human resources do have a big part to play, but should not be the only guiding factor. Tasking should consider the lifetime development of an analyst. Comfort zones should be breached, with a plan and a goal-oriented approach. It also benefits the analyst via wider understanding of the operational or strategic environment they are tasked to analyze. This also helps the analyst and the organization as a whole to advance from situational awareness to the more desired situational understanding.
???????????Artificial
-?????????The boss of Google's search engine warned against the pitfalls of artificial intelligence in chatbots in a newspaper interview published on Saturday, as Google parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.O) battles to compete with blockbuster app ChatGPT.
-?????????In early February, first Google, then Microsoft, announced major overhauls to their search engines. Both tech giants have spent big on building or buying generative AI tools, which use large language models to understand and respond to complex questions. Now they are?trying to integrate them into search, hoping they’ll give users a richer, more accurate experience. The Chinese search company Baidu?has announced it will follow suit.
–???????????Abstract: This paper proposes a framework for quantitatively evaluating interactive LLMs such as ChatGPT using publicly available data sets. We carry out an extensive technical evaluation of ChatGPT using 21 data sets covering 8 different common NLP application tasks. We evaluate the multitask, multilingual and multi-modal aspects of ChatGPT based on these data sets and a newly designed multimodal dataset. We find that ChatGPT outperforms LLMs with zero-shot learning on most tasks and even outperforms fine-tuned models on some tasks. We find that it is better at understanding non-Latin script languages than generating them. It is able to generate multimodal content from textual prompts, via an intermediate code generation step. Moreover, we find that ChatGPT is 64.33% accurate on average in 10 different reasoning categories under logical reasoning, non-textual reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, hence making it an unreliable reasoner. It is, for example, better at deductive than inductive reasoning. ChatGPT suffers from hallucination problems like other LLMs and it generates more extrinsic hallucinations from its parametric memory as it does not have access to an external knowledge base. Finally, the interactive feature of ChatGPT enables human collaboration with the underlying LLM to improve its performance, i.e, 8% ROUGE-1 on summarization and 2% ChrF++ on machine translation, in a multi-turn "prompt engineering" fashion.
???????????Strategic
-?????????Last week, a Chinese surveillance balloon floating over the United States set off a political firestorm in Washington. It also offered a glimpse into the secret world of intelligence gathering, where countries are racing to harness new technologies that will help them gain a competitive edge. But these same new technologies are making spycraft, especially the collection of human intelligence, far more challenging.
-?????????Near the banks of Montana’s Musselshell River, cattle rancher Michael Miller saw a large, white orb above the town of Harlowton last week, a day before U.S. officials revealed they were tracking a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the state. The balloon caused a stir in the 900-person town surrounded by cattle ranches, wind farms and scattered nuclear missile silos behind chain link fences.
?????????????Afrique: ces fake news qui empoisonnent l'action des forces armées fran?aises - Challenges
–???????????Après le Mali, le Burkina Faso... L'influence de la Russie se développe en Afrique subsaharienne, avec un angle d'attaque: les fake news.?Pour parer ces attaques informationnelles, qui ont souvent pour origine les?mercenaires?du groupe Wagner, les armées et le Quai d'Orsay contre-attaquent. Mais la partie n'est pas gagnée pour la France.
–???????????Speaking at Georgetown University, Burns said U.S. authorities knew “as a matter of intelligence” that Xi had ordered his country’s military to be ready to invade the democratic island by 2027.
领英推荐
–???????????China is providing technology that Moscow’s military needs to prosecute the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine despite an international cordon of sanctions and export controls, according to a Wall Street Journal review of Russian customs data.
???????????Collection
–???????????The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in intelligence gathering, also known as open source intelligence (OSINT), has revolutionized the way data is analyzed and insights are derived. However, as with any new technology, there are ethical and moral considerations that must be taken into account. This article will explore the ethical implications of using AI in intelligence gathering and discuss the importance of responsible use of the technology.
–???????????The State Department on Thursday released details about China’s high-altitude balloon surveillance program, declassifying information collected by U.S. U-2 spy planes and other sources to expose what the Biden administration is calling a sophisticated effort to surveil “more than 40 countries across five continents.”
–???????????A Chinese spy balloon that was shot down last week and several others that crossed into U.S. territory were part of a broader surveillance effort by Beijing, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson said Wednesday.
·????????Corporate OSINT for Social Engineering | by Christina Lekati | The First Digit | Feb, 2023 | Medium
-??????????If your work involves protecting organizations from social engineering attacks, you will most probably also be required to conduct open-source intelligence on the organization and its people. Your task will be to find vulnerabilities or high-risk information that is likely to be exploited by attackers in a social engineering attack. Such information would include: identifying specific technologies, key people, and their relationships with internal or external partners (typically used in spear-phishing attacks), the internal organizational culture and hierarchy, company events, and more. Your client organization will need to know which of the publicly available information poses a risk that needs to be removed or managed.
???????????Criminal
–???????????It was an innocuous-looking photograph that turned out to be the downfall of Zheng Xiaoqing, a former employee with energy conglomerate General Electric Power.
–???????????Corruption was endemic throughout the Trump administration. Throughout the entire length of his administration, corruption and high turnover was a daily occurrence, threatening the strength and integrity of government institutions and, in some cases, indirectly resulting in the deaths of Americans.
?????????????Researching the impact of corruption and organized crime on FDI in Europe: a literature review
–???????????Eastern European societies and their economies have experienced specific and/or asymmetrical developments over the last 70 years. The political regime changes at the end of the 80s led these countries on the path of market economy and opened the doors for foreign investors’ presence, as privatizations of previously state-owned companies were considered beneficial for economic progress. Starting in the mid-90s and more so after the association of countries in the region to the European Union and NATO, foreign investors found interesting opportunities as greenfield projects or partnerships with local entities. However, the presence of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Eastern Europe was uneven across countries and regions, which may be due to a certain extent to corruption and organized crime groups. This paper aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature that has focused on analyzing the influence of corruption and organized crime in attracting foreign direct investment using quantitative methods, focusing on empirical studies conducted in Europe since 2000. Our main purpose is to summarize the different research approaches, to offer a discussion and suggestions for future research, and to provide some relevant and justified answers to the following question: To what extent are corruption, organized crime, and FDI analyzed in European countries?
·????????Unpacking the political-criminal nexus in state-cybercrimes: a macro-level typology | SpringerLink
-?????????Criminological literature on crime and deviance in _cyber_space has boomed in recent years with most studies focusing on computer integrity _crime_s, computer content _crime_s and financial _cyber__crime_s, also discussing the opportunity to consider some of these _crime_s as profit-driven forms of organised crime. The existing literature, however, has not addressed extensively yet the impact of the emergence and proliferation of cyber affordances on forms of state-organized crime – a conceptualization that since the late ‘80?s proved successful in shedding light, among other things, on the relationships among social structures and criminality. Seeking to address this gap, this conceptual contribution focuses on state-_cyber__crime_s, where illegal, harmful or unjust cyber activities are committed for the benefit of a state or its agencies, offering a macro-typology to shed light on how cyber affordances are influencing and transforming the state-crime relations.
???????????Services
?????????????Estonian intelligence: Russia underestimated Ukraine's cyber resilience - The Record from Recorded Future News
–???????????Russia’s expectation that it would occupy Kyiv and overthrow the Ukrainian government during the first few weeks of the invasion last February may have caused the Kremlin initially to forgo _cyber_attacks against critical infrastructure, according to the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service.
-?????????The comments by the director general of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service contrasted with remarks made last October by Sir Jeremy Fleming, the head of the UK spy agency GCHQ, who said that Russian "supplies and munitions are running out".
–???????????Avec pour objectif l'embauche de 3?000?personnes, la campagne de recrutement de la NSA révèle l'ampleur des ambitions de Washington dans les domaines du renseignement électromagnétique et du cyber. Et pose un défi majeur que le service entend notamment relever en formant massivement de futures recrues.
–???????????On February 24 of last year Bruno Kahl, Germany's spy chief, was in Ukraine when Vladimir Putin ordered his forces over the border....