Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

Plus: AWS launches second Secret-level cloud region

AI has been a "game changer" for the intelligence community, according to US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who noted two key applications of the technology for classified government work at the Amazon Web Services DC Summit on Tuesday.

First, remember that big dump of previously classified files related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination that the Trump administration declassified in March?

"We have released tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of JFK and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and we have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously, which is to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages," Gabbard said on Tuesday. 

The documents didn't cast any new doubt on the official government story that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, but had several interesting revelations about the extent of the CIA's activities in the 1960s - including trying to set up visiting foreign dignitaries with female companionship, according to this summary by the Center for Politics. The truth is out there!

More prosaically, America's 18 intelligence agencies commissioned a chatbot that has now been deployed across all of them, including the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. 

"Making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top-secret clouds has been a game changer," Gabbard said on stage during the keynote address.

The "top-secret clouds" that Gabbard referenced are designed to process and store sensitive information up to the "Secret" classification level. 

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each have their own offerings that meet the security standards of US government agencies, including the intelligence community.

During Tuesday's keynote, AWS VP of Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy said the cloud giant will open its second cloud region accredited to support workloads up to the US Secret classification level this year.

AWS launched its first secret region in 2017, making it the first cloud provider to support government workloads across all of the US data classifications — Unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret. It announced plans for the second top-secret region, AWS Top Secret-West, in 2021, and four years later, it has earned the necessary security accreditations to support national security and defense customers in this new region.

Gabbard said she welcomed this type of private-sector innovation and wants to make it easier for the intelligence community to work with technology vendors.

"I want to get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself, because it's really not what the government is best at doing," she said. 

Instead, Gabbard said, she wants to build partnerships with tech giants like AWS and focus "on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can, so that our workforce can focus on the things that we are very good at, and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill." ®