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New AI espionage powers trigger Putin camera scare
FT archived at: https://archive.is/cO6fo#selection-1463.0-1463.50
Surveilling the Surveillers?
Russia paused surveillance system after killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader exposed how AI can be used on CCTV data to target enemies
Russia’s security services shut parts of a special surveillance system protecting President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides in the wake of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination in Tehran, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The system — which is separate from the nearly 300,000 cameras that surveil Moscow’s citizens — was only turned back on after engineers combed through it in an attempt to hermetically seal it off from the internet, said one of the people.
The extraordinary precautions were taken after Israeli intelligence harvested vast amounts of video footage from Iran’s traffic cameras to help pinpoint the exact location and timing of a February 28 meeting between Khamenei and his closest aides. Several top security officials were killed at the meeting in the opening salvo of the joint US-Israel war on the Islamic republic.
The assassination was a dramatic demonstration of a nascent technological leap: the use of artificial intelligence to parse through millions of hours of video, collected by thousands of cameras, in order to find and surveil targets.
The system — which is separate from the nearly 300,000 cameras that surveil Moscow’s citizens — was only turned back on after engineers combed through it in an attempt to hermetically seal it off from the internet, said one of the people.
The extraordinary precautions were taken after Israeli intelligence harvested vast amounts of video footage from Iran’s traffic cameras to help pinpoint the exact location and timing of a February 28 meeting between Khamenei and his closest aides. Several top security officials were killed at the meeting in the opening salvo of the joint US-Israel war on the Islamic republic.
The assassination was a dramatic demonstration of a nascent technological leap: the use of artificial intelligence to parse through millions of hours of video, collected by thousands of cameras, in order to find and surveil targets.