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The politics of machismo: masculinities, femininities and populism

The relationship between populism and a combination of sexism and masculine aggressiveness is a common theme in many of the contributions.

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the USA, and his macho discourse and style have contributed a central case study. In Trumps macho populism, Pablo Piccato and Federico Finchelstein see this association not merely as an issue of political style or a personality trait but argue that Donald Trump's treatment of women is rooted in populist and fascist ideas that exalt male power and promote misogyny. They argue that this machismo characteristic of populist leaders mixes aggressive capitalism and entrepreneurship with repressive gender stances, and point out that this links Trump with Berlusconi, Bucaram, or Duterte, to mention a few leaders.

Ornette Clennon, in Populism, the era of Trump and the rise of the far-right, makes the link between such identity politics and fascism clear by drawing on the work of Aim Csaire, David Olusoga, Casper Erichsen, Molefi Kete Asante, C. L. R. James and others, while, in Under Trump, we are all women, Soraya Chemaly suggests that the aggressive sexism of populist politics and leadership is one of the manifestations of a broader movement that seeks to disenfranchise and roll back rights gained with difficulty not only by women but by other marginalized and discriminated segments of the population.

References to this deeper meaning of the implications of the machismo of populist politics can also be found in several of the papers presented below. Sara Garbagnolis discussion of the celodurismo (permanent hard-on) that the League claims for its leaders and the litany of examples of machismo she produces, such as the filthy gesture that Umberto Bossi addressed to a female minister and the inflatable doll that Salvini waved during a meeting, again comparing this to the former female, Speaker of the House, Laura Boldrini is a case in point; as is Amrit Wilsons discussion of Hindu populisms conflation of communal aggression and the assertion of Hindu masculinity.

Anti-immigrant sentiment: time to talk about gender? meanwhile, summarizes a debate that took place in the third annual Migrant Voice conference in London back in 2013, Nikandre Kopcke brings to the fore the link between the debate on immigration (largely dominated by the populist far-right) and gender. What is rarely discussed is how gender figures in this picture she says, pointing out that anti-immigrant sentiment represents a rejection of feminized populations of people who are at a social disadvantage and less able to take care of themselves.

Concepts of the nation constructed by far-right nationalist organizations such Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, the Tea Party in the United States, and the BNP and UKIP in the UK are marked by masculine qualities such as strength, might, and prowess. Indeed, Kopcke says, all of these groups are concerned about the threat that immigrants pose to a national illusion that is distinctly masculine.

Dorit Geva, on the other hand, while exploring Marine Le Pens goosebump politics, complicates the picture by demonstrating how the iconic female right-wing populist leader deploys performative practices that cross, and test, the boundaries of the feminine and the masculine adopting both masculine and feminine personas and neutralizing the contradictions this entails.

Soumi Banerjee and Eva Svatonova cite this same blurring of the boundaries between masculine and feminine in other cases. Banerjee, focusing on aspects of the politics of gender in the Hindutva movement, notes the ambiguity inherent in the simultaneous commitment of the movement to maintaining a regressive patriarchal order that turns women into the wards of men and stresses their maternal roles, and its utilization of Hindu mythology in inspiring women into action to protect the very patriarchal order that seeks to confine them in the domestic arena.

Drawing on her ethnographic research, Svatonova casts a closer look at the explosive mix of femonationalism and populism in the Czech Republic, the way women are encouraged to become activists to protect traditional family values, and the gender roles that sustain and are informed by them.

Several articles seek to uncover the patriarchal bias, anti-feminist, and anti- LGBTIQ+ agendas of populist movements, parties and politicians in a body of work on right-wing populism in Europe. Claudia Torrisi, in her The war on Europes women and LGBTIQ people has only just begun takes further her earlier analysis of the formation of Italys new government after the general elections of 4 March 2018 and its implications for women and minorities. Torrisi suggests that despite the failure of the far-right to make significant advances in the 2019 European parliamentary elections, right-wing populist agendas have now been normalized and mainstreamed.

With it, she argues, an ambitious project of pulling back womens reproductive and social rights and delegitimizing LGBTIQ+ rights and identity politics, is all summarized as a campaign against the gender ideology that threatens the family with its European Judeo-Christian roots and endangers children through their hyper-sexualization. The article draws attention to the transnational connections of this anti-gender ideology movement and to the crackdown of the emboldened populists on dissent and critical voices.

These trends and their social-historical context are also examined by Sara Garbagnoli in her article Matteo Salvini, renaturalizing the racial and sexual boundaries of democracy. Garbagnoli discusses the centrality of anti-gender ideology in the discourse and policy of the Italian government formed in June 2018 and its articulation with an aggressive anti-immigrant nationalism. She identifies the convergences of Italys populist right agendas with those of its counterparts in France, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Brazil and Hungary. The Leagues homophobia and transphobia and the machismo of its leadership, Garbagnoli argues, are naturalized through the claim of the far-right that the ideology promoted by feminist and homosexualist lobbies endangers the nations survival.

In Getting to know you: mapping the anti-feminist face of right-wing populism in Europe, Oriane Gilloz, Nima Hairy and Matilda Flemming take a closer look at the agendas of three leading far-right populist parties in Europe the Front National, in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, and the Alternative fr Deutschland in Germany back in 2017. They identify that core elements in these include the restoration of traditional gender relations, the protection of the nuclear family, ending gender mainstreaming, gender equality, reversing marriage equality legislation and LGBT rights and terminating the promotion of gender research.

Christoph Sorg also discerns the deployment of a similar discourse by Germany's extreme right in We have created a monster. Right-wing populist narratives, he argues, perceive genderism as an ideology aiming to confuse men and women and thereby destroy the organic unity of the German people which posits women as childbearers in the service of the nation. Increasing social rights for women and LGBTIQ are thus not seen as the product of decades of social struggle but part and parcel of a conspiracy to undermine the German nation by globalist elites and their local agents.

Indeed, at least at first sight, not much has changed since 2016 when Sorg mapped the ideology of the German far-right, in terms of this emphasis on patriarchal norms. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz and Caner Tekin suggest as much in their own analysis of The gender turn of the populist radical right. However, drawing on the recent discourse and campaigning of the Rassemblement National (the Front National successor in France) and the Alternative fr Deutschland, they tease out the apparently contradictory logics that underlie them. They identify a relatively new emphasis on womens equality, and womens presence in the job market that allows the populist radical right to appeal to broader constituencies. Indeed, this is an element of the strategy of far-right populists we will turn to shortly.

Echoing the argument that (far-right) populism wages war on women that I have outlined above, another cluster of articles that have appeared in openDemocracy, go further in identifying the manifestly misogynist and violent traits of populism.

Deniz Kandiyotis The gender wars in Turkey: a litmus test of democracy? takes its cue from the highly emotional political contestation prompted by the gruesome sexual assault against, and murder of zgecan Aslan, a 20 year old student from Mersin, whose mutilated and partly burnt body was discovered in a riverbed in early 2015. She discusses the confluence of patriarchy and Turkeys AKP agendas.

Kandiyoti charts and analyses diametrically opposed reactions to the female students gruesome death. On the one hand, she argues, a set of arguments posit men both as custodians and protectors of women, and as potential predators and therefore conclude that the solution to the putative vulnerability of women is segregation. The implicit admission of such interpretations is that the public domain is unsafe, and thus out of bounds for women. On the other hand, critics of this logic condemn the mentality that puts women in peril unless they are segregated, and stresses that what endangers women and makes them feel out of place in the public domain is a culture of justifying violence against women and its embededness in moral judgements, social sanctions, institutional indifference and judicial decisions. Proponents of the latter line of reasoning cited cases where threatened women seeking police protection were ignored and legal judgements where men found to have exercised violence against women were given minor sentences, while female victims were deemed to have acted provocatively.

It is in this context that Kandiyoti situates President Erdogans othering of feminist advocates of womens rights as having no relation to our religion and our civilization instead of affording them protection. In her No laughing matter: Women and the new populism in Turkey, she demonstrates that the logic of protection is not only ideological, but extends beyond the practices of segregation to the expansion of welfare entitlements aimed specifically at women. Although this protection is experienced by many poorer women as citizenship through entitlement, it also comes with strings attached loyalty and appropriate behaviour.

Thus women who have absorbed the party's message about their god-given vocation as mothers and home makers become the deserving, whereas women that challenge such roles and, more importantly, the government and its policies, are excluded. The telling example of the Prime Minister doubting the virginity of a female protester brutalized by the police during protests in Ankara in 2011 implied that women breaking the norms of modesty and sexual propriety do not belong to the deserving.

The issue of propriety with particular reference to womens reproductive rights is also discussed in some detail in Serta Sehlikolus Vaginal obsessions in Turkey: an Islamic perspective. Although not explicitly using the term populism, Sehlikolu discusses the debates on the redrafting of Turkeys abortion legislation that took place in 2012-13 in the context of the AKPs pro-natalist message typical of the period. In these debates, the author suggests, abortion which, although legal, was already shunned, while women seeking it were faced with ill treatment was treated as tantamount to the murder of a member of the nation.

The right of women to a caesarean section was disputed on the grounds that it was likely to avert a subsequent birth. Womens reproductive rights, Sehlikolu argues, became the object of intense discussion by politicians in a way that contradicted the Islamic notion of privacy, as did the vilification of women who sought to exercise them or fought to uphold these rights.

Moving East, to India, Amrit Wilsons Gender violence, Narendra Modi and the Indian elections identifies the ways in which the Hindu nativist BJP and its sister organizations target minority women, and encourage the exercise of violence against them by urging Hindu men to demonstrate their masculinity by raping the women of these communities. At the same time, Wilson argues, the Hindutva movement advocates the intensification of surveillance and control over women in general and invokes the need to "protect" Hindu women from the sexual deviance of males from religious minorities and Dalits to justify violence against the latter communities.

Another important perspective relates to the use of gender in the discourse and practices of populist movements, parties and leaders in order to advance their nativist and populist agendas. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz and Caner Tekin link the gender sensitivity of right-wing populism to the culturalization of migration, effectively arguing that protecting the right women from unwanted invaders, migrants from primarily Muslim countries, or issues of gender equality, particularly in campaigns against Muslim right-wing nationalists as discussed elsewhere in Niki Seth-Smiths interview with Sara Farris, has become a staple and significant ingredient of the populist diet.

Similar arguments that explore the instrumentalization of womens rights to vilify and to other Muslim migrants are developed in some detail in discussions that focus primarily on the alliances of feminists with the far-right, or on the appropriation of womens or LGBTIQ+ rights discourse by the latter. Anders Rasmussen in Headscarves and homosexuals - feminist ideals in xenophobic politics explains how the condemnation of Muslim homophobia by the Danish far-right Danish Peoples Party, in addition to contributing to the stigmatisation and further marginalization of Danish Muslims, distracts public attention from a debate yet to be had in Denmark on the more general cultural and structural discrimination experienced by people with different sexual preferences.

At the same time, Rasmussen points out that the Danish Peoples Partys concern for the welfare of homosexuals when it comes to denouncing Muslim homophobia, is absent from their own policies. Christine Delphys Race, caste and gender in France likewise focuses on the criminalization of Islam in the name of feminism in France, albeit not only by the populist far-right, and argues that this appropriation of feminist discourse by proponents of a racist agenda is fundamentally paradoxical as anti-racism and anti-sexism must work together.

But, whereas appropriating the feminist and LGBTIQ+ agenda is a successful strategy for the populist right, Gkce Yurdakul, zgr zvatan and Anna Korteweg note the increasing power of implicit and explicit alliances between far-right actors and anti-Muslim German feminists in Germany and search for a strategy to stem this trend in Feminism gone bad? Womens organisations and the hard right in Germany.,

Yet another set of articles focuses even more on the motivations of women who join far-right populist organizations. In Why were Right: young women on the UKs growing right-wing scene in their own words, Lara Whyte explores a set of highly pertinent questions in a conversation with four women who have joined the populist right: what attracts women to the politics of the right, and what is it about movements of the left and feminism that some young women who opt for this find unappealing?

While, in Why are women joining far-right movements, and why are we so surprised? the introduction to 50.50s special series on women and the far-right Lara Whyte and Claire Provost, drawing on the work of several researchers, suggest that women joining far-right movements is not something new and explore key aspects of its long history.

The 50.50 project revisits this question in The Backlash podcast episode 1: women and the far-right, with Lara Whyte, with the help of councillor Jolene Bunting in Northern Ireland, researcher Marilyn Mayo in the US, and Akanksha Mehta from the University of Sussex, addressing who are the women enlisting in the populist far-right, what are they doing in these organizations and what the reasons that push them into this embrace.

In the context of the same project Ruth Rosen explores the emergence of the Tea Party and the new right-wing Christian feminism and suggests that many evangelical Christian women join the organization with the intention of entering the public sphere or even running for office to eliminate abortion, protect marriage, contain sexual relations, oppose gay marriage and clean up the mess made by the sexual revolution, while reclaiming the term feminism in the process.

Moving away from the global North, Isabel Marler and Macarena Aguilar examine the role women play in Myanmars Buddhist nationalist movement - MaBaTha. In Whats attracting women to Myanmars Buddhist nationalist movement? they argue that women involved in the nationalist movement see it as their job to promote womens interests and, at the same time to protect patriarchal and inegalitarian aspects of their religious traditions, considering this contradictory mix as unproblematically complementary, and resulting in little dissonance between their sense of fighting for womens equality and their involvement in a hugely discriminatory movement.

Ultimately the majority of the contributions reviewed seem to suggest that populism and gender come together in complex and ambiguous ways. Whereas populist discourse and practice do not shy away from expressing the desire to restore the clear and unambiguous gender roles circumscribed by patriarchy, they also invite women to become vocal, to engage in activism, and even in leadership. It is this validation of women, this invitation extended to them to enter the public domain, and ultimately, the articulation of calls to women to uphold patriarchal norms but outside the home, in the streets, the squares, the community and the political arena to which we must now turn our attention.

Note: Thanks to Tialda de Vries for her help in identifying the articles reviewed

Read the rest here:
Charting the waters: populism as a gendered phenomenon - Open Democracy

The National Security Agencys chief information officer may be unsure of what theyre supposed to be doing with attention being pulled disproportionately toward cybersecurity issues, according to the agencys inspector general.

The Agencys CIO role is ambiguous, without clearly defined authorities and responsibilities, the OIG wrote in the semi-annual report released Thursday, which otherwise gives NSA a pat on the back for implementing its recommendations.

The IG audited the agency for compliance with Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and an Office of Management and Budget memorandum, documents that describe the CIO role and responsibilities for budget, program and workforce management as well as overseeing information security.

Examining the implementation of an enterprise IT architecture program and the CIOs placement within the NSAs management structure, the IG said the agency and the CIO made substantial progress, but there were a few attention-grabbing reasons they noted as contributing to shortfalls.

These were dual hatting the functions of the CIO with those of an NSA Directorate, a lack of documentation for the delegation of authorities, failure to include the CIO role in agencyorganization charts, and agency communications that reinforced the CIOs authorities primarily for the information security component.

The CIO has the requisite oversight of and decision rights for all Agency IT, the IG explains, noting, The issues identified in this audit increase the risk that the agency ...may not be maximizing its effectiveness and efficiency in designing, investing in, acquiring, managing, and maintaining the full range of its IT.

The report said the IG made four recommendations to address the issue, and that the NSA has sufficiently addressed one of those, with actions planned to implement the other three.

In general, though, the IG reports the NSAs overdue recommendations for the period of April through September represented 59% of the total number of open recommendations, which was the lowest percentage of open recommendations that were overdue over the past four semi-annual reports.

This reflects significant progress, but there is still substantial work to be done, according to the latest report.

The OIG is now evaluating NSAs implementation of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014. That audit will focus specifically on assessing the agencys information security practices.

Link:
Unclear NSA CIO Role Puts the Agency's IT at Risk, IG Says - Nextgov

FT. MEADE, Md. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) is one of the first universities to partner with NSA on researching the science of security and has been working on cybersecurity problems with NSA for more than 19 years.

As one of the initial schools to be designated to host an NSA Science of Security (SoS) Lablet, Illinois has been instrumental in stimulating basic research to create scientific underpinnings for security and advocating for scientific rigor in security research, said NSA Deputy Director George Barnes. The Illinois SoS Lablet builds on a long history in developing science upon which systems might be engineered.

To celebrate this partnership, NSA has named Illinois as a featured schooland ishighlighting the collaboration on NSA.gov, IntelligenceCareers.gov, and on social media beginning January 23, 2020.

As a public comprehensive research university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has an opportunity and responsibility to advance our society, said Illinois Chancellor Robert Jones. We are honored to be named a National Security Agency Featured School, and we look forward to continuing to partner to develop the talent and tools needed for our national security challenges.

The partnership began in 2000 when Illinois was designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense(CAE-CD), a program now jointly sponsored by NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. That program, along with a CAE-Research designation, which Illinois received in 2008, promotes higher education and research in the critical area of cybersecurity.

At about the same time NSA researchers began collaborating with Illinois faculty and students in support of broad cybersecurity and assurance goals, to include research in programming languages and system verification in support of systems analysis.

This early work with Illinois led to valued capability developments that are still in use within NSA and partner federal agencies today, said Mr. Brad Martin, Illinois Academic Liaison.

In 2011, Illinois became one of just three universities to host a SoS Lablet. Dr. David Nicol, a professor at Illinois, has been involved in the lablet since the beginning and appreciates the fact that NSA has been investing in research at the early conceptual stages.

I was pleased that the problem of viewing the scientific basis for security was being taken seriously, he said. Its commendable that NSA recognized this issue and invested resources in studying it.

NSA has also awarded Illinois more than $600,000 in grants over the last five years and has hosted a number of summer interns from the university. Currently, two students at Illinois are in the Stokes Educational Scholarship Program, which recruits students, particularly minorities, who have demonstrated skills critical to NSA. The students receive up to $30,000 a year toward their college education and commit to summer internships and six years of agency employment following graduation.

Currently 115 Illinois graduates with degrees at all levels in areas from mathematics to Russian work at NSA.We have many talented employees at NSA who have come from Illinois, said Ms. Kathy Hutson, NSAs Senior Strategist for Academic Engagement. We are so pleased with the partnership we have forged with the university and what it has yielded for NSA.

Illinois is the fifth university to be named an NSA Featured School. The series highlights schools designated as CAEs that have a depth and breadth of engagement with the Agency.

The rest is here:
NSA and University of Illinois: Partnering to Secure Networks and Cyber Systems - Illinois Computer Science News

But a newfound appetite for curtailing U.S. surveillance practices has emerged among Republicans who have criticized the FBIs eavesdropping of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, making them willing to buck the Trump administrations demands that the program be permanently extended.

And intelligence officials arent making the case to keep to phone records program, either. Theyve previously admitted it has become too technically complex a burden to maintain.

Longtime privacy advocates on the Hill are seizing on this momentum to kill the program theyve argued is ineffective and violates Americans rights before the statute authorizing it expires on March 15.

This is a big moment for reformers, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is looking to push for greater surveillance changes given this new climate in Congress, told POLITICO this month.

Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the panels top Democrat, introduced legislation that would render the program essentially inoperable while renewing the laws other surveillance authorities predominantly used by the FBI for another eight years.

I plan to propose to leadership that we move, in some fashion, [our] bill, Burr said.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), whose panel held a contentious public hearing with an NSA official who couldnt offer examples of the program helping in terror probes, said the proposed legislation works for him.

Meanwhile, in the Democrat-controlled House, the Judiciary and Intelligence committees have been working together for months on a bill that would pull the plug on the surveillance tool once and for all.

The panels are writing a proposal that will both renew authorities necessary to the protection of national security, while also bolstering additional privacy and transparency safeguards where appropriate, a senior Democratic House Intelligence Committee official told POLITICO.

Obviously, time is of the essence, and we hope to come to [a] consensus in the coming month or so, the official added.

A House Democratic aide said the program was built to address an adversary and a technological gap that existed 25 years ago, but times have changed. Bad guys don't use landlines to talk to each other anymore The technology is different. It is less valuable to us today than it was than it would have been in 2001 when they needed it.

But a critical player is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has yet to indicate he would buck the White House over the intelligence tool. A McConnell spokesperson declined to comment, and a spokesperson for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment from POLITICO about the broad resistance from Congress.

The NSA gained the ability to access and analyze Americans domestic calling records shortly after 9/11. Established in secret, the program was designed to vacuum up metadata the numbers and time stamps for calls or text messages but not the actual content so the agency could sift for links among possible associates of terror suspects.

The Snowden leaks eventually forced the Obama administration and Congress to settle on a new law, the USA Freedom Act, that ended NSAs bulk phone collection but allowed the records to be retained by telephone companies and accessed by the federal government with court approval.

Problems with the revised system began to emerge publicly in 2018 when the NSA announced it had uncovered technical irregularities that caused it to collect more phone records than it had legal authority to gather. The agency dumped its entire collection of phone records. However, the problem soon resurfaced, according to an inspector general report.

The recurring compliance headaches around the program, its negative association with Snowden and an inability by intelligence leaders to offer concrete examples of its value in fighting terrorism led a spectrum of observers including former and current intelligence officials to question if the scaled down system was worth keeping at all.

The administration had been quiet about its intentions for the future of the program. Thats a contrast to 2017 when the White House and the intelligence community successfully pressed lawmakers to renew a separate set of warrantless programs that intercept digital traffic of foreign targets while collecting personal information on Americans.

In March, a senior congressional aide revealed that the NSA had deactivated the domestic surveillance program. Then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats confirmed that fact in a letter to Congress in August, which acknowledged that the system has been indefinitely shut down but still asked lawmakers to extend its legal basis.

On Capitol Hill, the urge to strike the program from the books only grew. But in December, lawmakers were forced to include language in a stopgap government funding bill that punted the deadline for the surveillance programs by 90 days, until March 15.

The move was made, in part, because the House impeachment inquiry dominated much of the congressional calendar and to wait for potentially consider additional surveillance reforms, some of which were highlighted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitzs review of the FBIs handling of its investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016.

A lot of very smart people had a notion that it would be a bad idea for us to pass a bill the first week of December and to have an IG report detailing the inner depths of the FISA process come out the second week of December and then look foolish, the House Democratic aide told POLITICO.

The aide said that on big ticket questions there isnt a lot of daylight between the existing Senate bill and the one that will be produced by the House Judiciary and Intelligence panels, though an eight-year extension of the other authorities isnt likely to pass the lower chamber.

Other issues could also complicate the short window left for lawmakers to take up the surveillance law.

This week, Wyden and a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers introduced a bill that would end the program, codify an intelligence community decision to stop location-tracking surveillance activities, and change the process for obtaining court approval for surveillance, while proposing additional transparency measures.

To pass a bill where everybody says the thing doesn't work and we're just going to write into law what they're already doing and then call it a day, I think, would be very unfortunate because there's a lot more to do, Wyden said.

But additional changes appear to be a non-starter for Burr, who advised Wyden and others to introduce legislation if they want to see them enacted.

Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and co-director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said offing the program should be the bare minimum lawmakers try to achieve.

When you have a surveillance program that has collected more than a billion records of Americans some of them without legal authorization, and all of them without any significant benefit its a no-brainer that the program should be terminated, she said.

The House aide said the expectation is for legislation to be introduced and voted on, at least by the Judiciary Committee, before going to the full chamber before the March 15 deadline. An overwhelmingly bipartisan House vote could send a message to the Senate to get on board with its bill.

Burr suggested that any extension would have to be hitched to another must-pass bill something in short supply this time of year. Such a move would prevent the legislation from being jammed on the floor by privacy hawks like Wyden and Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Mike Lee (Utah).

Burr didnt rule out another short-term extension, either.

Im not going to rule out that we may have an effort by leadership to extend the authorization another 90 days or 60 days or something, Burr said.

We still have to do it. This is a must do.

See the article here:
Powerful lawmakers join effort to kill surveillance program protected by Trump administration - POLITICO

Putting AI to its broadest use in national defense will mean hardening it against attack.

Americas intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSAs regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it analysts, policy-makers and leaders must better understand how advanced AI systems reach theirconclusions.

Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNIs year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasnt allowed to discusseverything that hes doing, but he could talk about a fewexamples.

At the Intelligence Communitys Open Source Enterprise, AI is performing a role that used to belong to human readers and translators at CIAs Open Source Center: combing through news articles from around the world to monitor trends, geopolitical developments, and potential crises inreal-time.

Imagine that your job is to read every newspaper in the world, in every language; watch every television news show in every language around the world. You dont know whats important, but you need to keep up with all the trends and events, Souleles said. Thats the job of the Open Source Enterprise, and they are using technology tools and tradecraft to keep pace. They leverage partnerships with AI machine-learning industry leaders, and they deploy these cutting-edgetools.

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AI is also helping the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, notify sailors and mariners around the world about new threats, like pirates, or new navigation information that might change naval charts. Its a mix of open source and classified information. That demands that we leverage all available sources to accurately, and completely, and correctly give timely notice to mariners. We use techniques like natural language processing and other AI tools to reduce the timelines reporting, and increase the volume of data. And that allows us to leverage and increase the accuracy and completeness of our reporting, Souleles said.

The NSA has begun to use AI to better understand and see patterns in the vast amount of signals intelligence data it collects, screening for anomalies in web traffic patterns or other data that could portend an attack. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, has said that he wants AI to find vulnerabilities in systems that the NSA may need to access for foreignintelligence.

NSA analysts and operators are also using AI to make sure they are following the many rules and guidelines that govern how the NSA collects intelligence on foreigntargets.

We do a lot of queries, NSA-speak for accessing signals intelligence data on an individual, Souleles said. Queries require audits to make sure that NSA is complying with thelaw.

But NSA technicians realized that audited queries can be used to train AI to get a jump on the considerable paperwork this entails, by learning to predict whether a query is reportable with pretty high accuracy, Souleles said. That could help the auditors and compliance officers do perform their oversight roles faster. He said the goal isnt to replace human oversight, just speed up and improve it. The goal for them is to get ahead of query review, to be able to make predictions about compliance, and the end result is greater privacy production foreveryone.

In the future, Souleles expects AI to ease analysts burdens, proving instantaneous machine translation and speech recognition that allows analysts to pour through different types of collected data, corroborate intelligence, and reach firmer conclusions, said Jason Matheny, a former director at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and founding director of the new Center for Security and Emerging Technology at GeorgetownUniversity.

One roadblock is the labor of collecting and labeling training data, said Souleles. While that same challenge exists in the commercial AI space, the secretive intelligence community cannot generally turn to, say, crowdsourcing platforms like Amazons Mechanical Turk.

The reason that image recognition works so well is that Stanford University and Princeton published Imagenet. Which is 14 million images of the regular things of the world taken from the internet, classified by people into about 200,000 categories of things, everyday things of the world; toasters, and TVs, and basketballs. Thats training data, says Souleles. We need to do the same thing with our classified collections and we cant, obviously, rely on the worlds Mechanical Turks to go classify our data inside our data source. So, weve got a big job in getting ourdata.

But the bigger problem is making AI models more secure, says Matheny. He says that todays flashy examples of AI, such as beating humans at complex games like Go and rapidly identifying faces, werent designed to ward off adversaries spending billions to try and defeat them. Current methods are brittle, says Methany. He described them as vulnerable to simple attacks like model inversion, where you reveal data a system was trained on, or trojans, data to mislead asystem,

In the commercial world, this isnt a big problem, or at least it isnt seen as one yet, because theresno adversary trying to spoof the system. But concern is rising, in 2017, researchers at MIT showed how easy it was to fool neural networks with 3D-printed objects by just slightly changing the texture. Its an issue that some in the intelligence community are beginning to talk about as well with the rise of new tools such as general adversarialnetworks.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has proposed an AI security program. Matheny said national labs should also play a leading role. To date, this is piecemeal work that an individual has done as part of a research project, hesaid.

Even a bigger problem is that humans generally dont understand the processes by which very complex algorithms like deep learning systems and neural nets reach the determinations that they do. That may be a small concern for the commercial world, where the most important thing is the ultimate output, not how it was reached, but national security leaders who must defend their decisions to lawmakers, say opaque functioning isnt good enough to make war or peacedecisions.

Most neural nets with a high rate of accuracy are not easily interpretable, says Matheny. There have been individual research programs at places like DARPA to make neural nets more explainable. But it remains a keychallenge.

New forms of advanced AI are slowly replacing some neural nets. Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, an AI company partnered with Raytheon, says she switched from traditional neural nets to genetic algorithms in some of her national security work. Unlike neural nets, where the system sets its own statistical weights, genetic algorithms evolve sequentially, just like organisms, and are thus more traceable. Look at a tool like Fiddler, a web debugging proxy that helps users debug and analyze web traffic patterns, she said. Theyre doing sensitivity analysis with what I would consider neural nets to figure out the why, what is the machine seeing that didntnecessarily.

But Eggers notes that making neural nets transparent also takes a lot of computing power, For all the different laws that intelligence analysts have to follow, the laws of physics present their own challenges aswell.

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Spies Like AI: The Future of Artificial Intelligence for the US Intelligence Community - Defense One