Issues of Law Raised by Developments and Use of Neuroscience and Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 138

THE ADVENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
There are well-known efforts to exploit the Internet to monitor public and nonpublic
information. Neurotechnology will likely play a key role in these advances, similar to
traditional forms of cybertechnology. Investment arms of the CIA and Google have
backed Recorded Future, which monitors the web in real time and uses the informa-
tion to predict the future. The company claims that its temporal analytics engine “goes
beyond reach” by “looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about
the same, or related, entities and events” (Shachtman 2010). “The idea,” journalist
Noah Schachtman writes, “is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where
it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, show-
ing online 'momentum' for any given event” (Shachtman 2010). The company main-
tains an index with over 100 million events hosted on Amazon.com servers, although
it performs analysis on the living web. The technology enables it to spot trends and
developments early. Shachtman reports that this technology enabled Israeli President
Shimon Peres to corroborate his claim that Hezbollah possessed Scud-like weapons
(see Recorded Future's description of its ability to analyze past, present, and future
trends using data archives and to anticipate actions, behavior, and intent from the web-
site https://www.recordedfuture.com/.).
Potential cognitive hacking, rooted in neurotechnology, would raise confluent
issues of policy, ethics, and law. Overt hacking that spoofs a legitimate website to
provide misleading information—for example, to gain access to passwords—could
be an effective military tactic. A key offensive objective may be to trick networks
into giving away information. One sees a parallel in organized criminal efforts to
trick computer users into opening files that lead them to a fraudulent banking site to
which confidential financial information is passed (Poulson 2011). Today that would
be generally accepted as a valid military tactic.
Active authentication programs employ neuroscience to authenticate user pass-
words. One aspect uses covert games disguised as computer anomalies to verify
unique user features through the user's responses to changes in the games. Another
examines cognitive abilities expressed through keystrokes to understand how indi-
viduals process information on computer screens in order to validate user identity
(Cybenko et al. 2003; Guidorizzi 2013). 6 Will people feel equally comfortable about
neurotechnology that provides the ability to covertly manipulate the human brain to
extract information from the network?
WHAT LEGAL RULES SHOULD APPLY?
The practical applications and possibilities for neurotechnology in national secu-
rity scenarios are tantalizing. These applications can be controversial, partly due
to their international effects. Hence, informed analysis of the ethical and legal
issues requires an integrated approach that looks to include norms embraced in
international law. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
explicitly recognizes “the right to freedom of thought” (Article 18). It observes
that all human beings “are endowed with reason and conscience and should
act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (Article 1). These are noble