On the latest episode of the Washington AI Network podcast, host Tammy Haddad is joined at FBI Headquarters by Jonathan Lenzner, Chief of Staff to the Director, and Bryan Vorndran, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. The group discussed the FBI’s efforts to defend Americans against threats leveraging artificial intelligence and explored the Bureau’s relationships with private industry, privacy concerns in the use of facial recognition technology, the recent rise in sextortion cases, and the dangers of encrypted messaging apps and adversarial machine learning.
Jonathan Lenzner on protecting American innovation and advice to CEOs: “Number one, nation-state and bad actors are coming for your IP and coming for your technology. Number two, I would recommend having that relationship with the FBI now, before the attack happens. Know your field office, know the headquarters divisions who cover your industry.”
Bryan Vorndran on the importance of adversarial machine learning: “The FBI cares because it’s predictive analysis to define threats that are, may not have been, manifested in the wild, but that we expect to manifest in the wild. So, there’s three of them.… The first one is what we call an evasion attack… the second one is called data poisoning… and the third is what we call a privacy attack… I think why the FBI cares is because it’s going to be predictive for our work.”
Jonathan Lenzner on relationships with private industry: “We are trying to make sure that we are having as much of an impact in our engagements with the private sector. And the ways that we try to develop these relationships. One way is to actually join forces and protect America together. So, we’re trying to share timely information with companies, we’re trying to make sure that we’re being responsive even when we can’t be transparent, and then also building meaningful partnerships with them.”
Byran Vorndran on the increasing sophistication of AI frauds and scams: “Whether we’re talking about voice cloning, which can be done by just a few seconds of audio or video, or true synthetic content in terms of images or videos, these things are becoming a reality of our present life. They’re becoming increasingly hard to spot because of the sophistication of software. And I would say as a country, we have not put ourselves in yet to precision ways to identify what is real and what is not real.”
Other Notable Attendees Included: Alex Alper, Ed Buckley, Rachel Appleton, Doug Calidas, Deb Cunningham, Rob Danegger, Victoria Espinel, Sena Fitzmaurice, Susan Fox, Arun Gupta, Brian Hale, Steve Hartell, Barbara Humpton, Alex Kelly, Niamh King, Karina Martinez, Martin Matishak, Felipe Million, Dan Meyers, Maryam Mujica, Jane Lee Naylor, Jessica Nigro, Kathy O’Hearn, Brittany Bramell Punaro, John Rizzo, Trooper Sanders, Govind Shivkumar, Jamie Tarabay, Lara Tennyson, Paul Tierney, Christian Vasquez, Andre Welch, Heather Wingate, and Candi Wolff.
Listen to the full episode on Audioboom, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.