Currently, "classification" can be used for political purposes. But an AI would be smarter? It’s tricky determining how sensitive intelligence information really is, and how it should be classified: whether it should be secret, top secret, and so on. It’s something machines can’t quite do yet considering they have no real understanding of human text.
The US Department of Defense is exploring whether or not it's worth using artificially intelligent software to suggest levels of classification for information – and control who gets access to it.
A sneak peek into the military's formal request for ideas on the matter, filed back in May, and the recent responses from tech suppliers, give hints at how such a system would work.
“To continue to securely create, access, process, manipulate, and monitor information, DoD CIO has the need to identify potential sources that can provide a commercial off-the-shelf [solution] to implement discretionary access controls on top of the currently established mandatory access controls,” the department's officials wrote in their requirements.
“The tool will require the user to ultimately define a security classification marking but might offer suggestions based upon dirty words or internal classification markings,” the Pentagon officials wrote in their requirements, describing some kind of Microsoft Word Clippy assistant but for intelligence analysts.
El Reg also wrote: the Internal Revenue Service, also recently filed a request for information to see how machine-learning technology could be used to secure taxpayers' records on its servers.