Security Aspects
The aspects in which artificial intelligence can be incorporated are limitless. Security is just one area where artificial intelligence is used. Artificial intelligence have been used in home security as well as national security. One aspect in which artificial intelligence is implemented are in intrusion detection systems or IDS. The main goal of an intrusion detection system is to “detect unauthorized users attempting to enter into a computer system” (Frank, 1994). Before the implementation of artificial intelligence, the intrusion detection systems were being built by hand and the systems were having difficulty “identifying intruders and require a significant amount of computational overhead” (Frank, 1994), meaning that it was becoming difficult in creating the intrusion detection systems. The use of artificial intelligence decreased these issues in that it reduced human effort required to build the systems and it improved the performance of the system.
While artificial intelligence has been helpful in some aspects of security, in other aspects, it has been met with some resistance. One example of this is with domestic warrantless wiretapping program, artificial intelligence “is believed to be used in scanning the internal communication of domestic callers for keywords and other information that could indicate terrorism”(Borowski, 2010). While it may seem that it could be a helpful security tool, many are against it because artificial intelligence “has little effect on safeguarding privacy rights” which is why many people challenged the domestic wiretapping program when it was revealed.
Since there were many people against this type of artificial intelligence usage, the Obama administration decided to go another route where there was a balance in privacy and the issue of national security. One way artificial intelligence remained as a central role in national security was by using artificial intelligence to “analyze the raw communications traffic of known terrorists to identify potential domestic terrorists” (Borowski, 2010) which maintained a level of privacy for the public yet still held up national security. This use of artificial intelligence gathered the general routing information and the phone number but not the content of any phone call. The communication traffic can be acquired and analyzed by artificial intelligence to “discover recurring patterns” (Borowski, 2010) and this way it can ensure that wiretaps occur only by probable cause.