Biden sworn in as president, and Capitol attack puts Big Tech on the defensive while facial recognition use soars

Worth Knowing

Capitol Attack Puts Big Tech Under Spotlight: The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has increased scrutiny of many of the country’s largest technology companies, including some of its most prolific AI developers:

Observers placed some of the blame on social media algorithms used by sites such as Facebook and YouTube, arguing that these systems, which often prioritize engagement over other metrics, enabled unfounded conspiracy theories to spread widely and radicalized many of the individuals who stormed the Capitol building.
Amazon Web Services suspended Parler, the social media platform where some of the rioters organized and coordinated their movements, from its web-hosting service. While some observers applauded the move, others expressed concern over the seemingly unilateral power held by AWS — which is also a major player in AI services — to take down a social media platform used by millions. While Parler is still looking for another permanent hosting service, very few have the capacity to handle the traffic of a site of its size. Parler’s CEO, meanwhile, said his company would employ algorithmic content moderation in the future but didn’t offer details about what form it would take.
In the wake of the attack, many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch and Spotify banned or suspended the accounts of President Trump and several allies. While research by the analytics firm Zignal found that sharing of misinformation about election fraud dropped significantly afterward, the bans may have deepened the divide between the country’s largest technology companies and regulators around the world. The Justice Department had already brought antitrust lawsuits against Facebook and Google (of which YouTube is a subsidiary) last year, and this month’s events have reportedly increased interest in regulation among both U.S. and European lawmakers.
More: How YouTube helps form homogeneous online communities | Big Tech Has Helped Trash America | Import AI: Parler is about to step on a big ‘ol algorithm rake | When Will Parler Return? Website Homepage Reappears With Report of Russian Aid

Facial Recognition Tool Sees Usage Grow After Capitol Riot: The CEO of Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool favored by law enforcement, said his platform saw a 26 percent usage spike the day after supporters of President Trump attacked the Capitol. At least two police departments confirmed publicly that they were using the tool, which scrapes data from social media and other public sites, to identify rioters: The Wall Street Journal reported that an Alabama police department had used Clearview to identify suspects from the attack, while a Miami police official told The New York Times that his department was running pictures from the riot through the tool to generate leads. While the use of Clearview has been banned in some precincts, it remains popular around the country. According to its CEO, Clearview had contracts with 2,400 law enforcement agencies as of last August.

More: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It | U.S. lawmakers aim to curtail face recognition even as the technology IDs Capitol attackers

Semiconductor Shortages Put The Brakes On Car Factories: Facing widespread shortages of the computer chips used in cars, auto manufacturers have scaled back production and, in some cases, shut down factories until the semiconductor supply increases. After car sales fell 15 percent last year, chipmakers reassigned production to other types of chips. With demand now recovering more quickly than expected, manufacturers are scrambling to source the 50-150 chips found in the average car. In response to the shortages, Audi has furloughed 10,000 workers, Ford has suspended production at plants in the United States and Germany, and Volkswagen, the world’s largest carmaker, could reportedly scale back production by 100,000 cars — 4 percent of global quarterly output — in the first three months of 2021.

More: A Year of Poor Planning Led to Carmakers’ Massive Chip Shortage | Global chip shortage threatens production of laptops, smartphones and more

Government Updates

Biden Sworn In As 46th President: Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sworn in yesterday as the 46th President of the United States. Following Biden’s election in November, we wrote about the Biden campaign’s AI-relevant policy proposals and messaging. Highlights from that recap include:

Biden’s “Made in America” plan, which calls for a $300 billion investment in R&D and breakthrough technologies, including AI.
Biden’s 2019 pledge to work with allies to “draft a new strategic concept for NATO that acknowledges the challenges of … disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence.”
Two Biden publications, one a written response to questions from the Council on Foreign Relations and the other an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, that touched on his goals for AI.

Since then, Biden has appointed a number of individuals to key positions related to AI and emerging technology policy, including:

Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology. Previously the cybersecurity director at the NSA, Neuberger will take over the newly-established role on the NSC.
Tarun Chhabra, Senior Director for Technology and National Security, National Security Council. Chhabra, previously a Senior Fellow at CSET, will rejoin government after serving on the National Security Council staff under President Obama.
Eric Lander, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander, a biology professor at MIT and Harvard Medical School and a former science adviser to President Obama, will become director of OSTP, which Biden has elevated to a Cabinet-level position, once confirmed by the Senate.
Michael Sulmeyer, Senior Director for Cyber, National Security Council. Previously a Senior Fellow at CSET, Sulmeyer was an adviser to National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command leader Gen. Paul Nakasone and served in the Defense Department during the Obama administration.
Laura Rosenberger, Senior Director for China, National Security Council. Previously, Rosenberger was a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and also worked on the NSC staff under President Obama.

White House Launches National AI Initiative Office: Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy established the National AI Initiative Office, charged with developing and implementing a national AI strategy and coordinating federal and private sector research. The office was created pursuant to the National AI Initiative Act, which became law earlier this month as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The law tasks the new office with developing a strategic plan for artificial intelligence within two years, promoting access to innovative technologies across the federal government, and serving as the point of contact on federal AI activities for departments, industry and academia.

Army and DHS Look to Expand Facial Recognition Capabilities: The Army and the Department of Homeland Security have been exploring facial recognition systems that can work while operating in suboptimal conditions:

The Army Research Lab, working with several research universities and the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, built a dataset of thermal images of faces that can be used to train facial recognition systems to work in the dark. While the dataset is the largest of its kind, according to a paper published by the researchers, accurate thermal facial recognition technology requires more development; initial tests of algorithms trained on the data failed to identify subjects wearing glasses or posing at different angles.
DHS, meanwhile, is testing facial recognition platforms that can identify subjects wearing protective face masks. During a yearly biometric technology rally run by the department’s R&D unit, researchers tested 60 facial recognition configurations (six face and/or iris acquisition systems and 10 matching algorithms) on both masked and unmasked subjects. DHS reported the best-performing system correctly identified subjects 96 percent of the time, but the median system achieved only a 77 percent success rate, compared to 93 percent for the median system with unmasked individuals. Despite the promising results, reports indicate DHS doesn’t plan to change its processes, which require international travellers to remove their masks briefly, any time soon.

In Translation
CSET’s translations of significant foreign language documents on AI

PRC Ministry of Education Notice: Notice on the Publication of “Certain Opinions on Promoting Curricula Merging at ‘Double World-Class’ Institutes of Higher Education and on Accelerating the Cultivation of Graduate Students in the AI Field.” This document, issued by the PRC Ministry of Education in 2020, recommends a number of measures to improve China’s system for cultivating AI talent. Most of the recommendations address two basic problems: the disconnect between academic training of AI graduate students and the AI work being done in industry, and the difficulty of designing curricula for a field as interdisciplinary as AI.

Commercialization of Chinese S&T Breakthroughs: CSET has translated eight recent PRC laws and regulations on the “conversion of S&T achievements,” referring to the process by which technological breakthroughs are adopted for commercial or other practical use.

If you have a foreign-language document related to security and emerging technologies that you’d like translated into English, CSET may be able to help! Click here for details.

What We’re Reading

Report: AI and International Stability: Risks and Confidence-Building Measures, Michael Horowitz and Paul Scharre, CNAS (January 2021)

Report: Decoupling – Severed Ties and Patchwork Globalisation, European Chamber of Commerce in China and Merics (January 2021)

Article: Can You be More Social? Injecting Politeness and Positivity into Task-Oriented Conversational Agents, Yi-Chia Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Runze Wang, Zhaleh Feizollahi, Gokhan Tur and Robert Kraut (December 2020)

Article: AI: Still Just Curve Fitting, Not Finding a Theory of Everything, Gary N. Smith (December 2020)

Article: Google trained a trillion-parameter AI language model, Kyle Wiggers, VentureBeat (January 2021)

What’s New at CSET

REPORTS

The U.S. AI Workforce: Understanding the Supply of AI Talent by Diana Gehlhaus and Santiago Mutis
A New Institutional Approach to Research Security in the United States: Defending a Diverse R&D Ecosystem by Melissa Flagg and Zachary Arnold
AI and the Future of Cyber Competition by Wyatt Hoffman

PUBLICATIONS AND PODCASTS

Towards Data Science Podcast: The Strategic and Security Implications of AI featuring Helen Toner
The Jamestown Foundation: Buying Silence: The Price of Internet Censorship in China by Ryan Fedasiuk
Perry World House, UPenn: The Immigration Preferences of Top AI Researchers: New Survey Evidence by Remco Zwetsloot

FORECASTS
CSET has a crowd forecasting platform. Sign up as a forecaster, and take a look at some of the predictions so far:

IN THE NEWS

The Washington Post: Earlier this month, President-elect Joe Biden announced several new members of his National Security Council staff, including CSET Senior Fellow Tarun Chhabra. The Washington Post reported on Chhabra’s appointment in a recent article.
Politico: News of Chhabra’s appointment was also picked up by Weekly Cybersecurity, Politico’s cybersecurity policy newsletter.
The Hill: The Hill also reported on recent Biden appointments, including Chhabra’s.
The Nation: For an article about the U.S.-China relationship under President Biden, Jeet Heer spoke with Chhabra about how China’s human rights record affects cooperation between Washington and Beijing.
Vice: A Vice article about the future of U.S.-China competition cited the 2019 CSET report “Keeping Top AI Talent in the United States” by Remco Zwetsloot.
National Defense Magazine: An article by National Defense Magazine editor-in-chief Stew Magnuson cited the recent brief by Jacob Feldgoise and Zwetsloot about Chinese undergraduate and graduate students in the United States.
War on the Rocks: In a War on the Rocks article about the future of national security and emerging technologies, authors John Speed Meyers and David Jackson named CSET as one of the reasons for the increased attention paid to AI and national security.
Newsy: Research Fellow Margarita Konaev spoke with Newsy about technology cooperation between China and Russia.

Upcoming Events

January 25-26: NSCAI, NSCAI Virtual Public Plenary Meeting
January 26-28: NIST, Explainable AI Workshop

What else is going on? Suggest stories, documents to translate & upcoming events here.

A Year-End Review

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