AI Analysis of Bin Laden Data Revealed Future al-Qaeda Plots

The United States found a treasure trove of information on al-Qaeda’s future plots during its raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan’s Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, that was deciphered later using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The U.S. Navy special operators carried out a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-led operation to kill or capture OBL, the founder of al-Qaeda group which responsible for many terrorist activities including the 9/11 attacks, from Afghanistan. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others, also collaborated in the operation.

In a webcast yesterday, Brian Drake, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)'s Science and Technology director of AI, said DIA's National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC), working with the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others, collaborated on this.

The webcast, titled "Human Machine Team: The Intersection of Diverse Skill Sets" was sponsored by Defense One.

The media that was captured was flown to NMEC, where rudimentary AI was able to exploit the data to discover future al-Qaeda plans.

NMEC invested early in AI capabilities across the board, he said, in things like text recognition, object detection, machine translation and audio and image categorization that allowed them to go through petabytes of data that they get from document exploitation.

The result was tens of billions of pieces of relevant data that allowed analysts to quickly delve into the terrorist organization. The data alerted them to future plots, emerging threats and a greater understanding of mysteries they didn't understand before, he said.

“Had AI not been used in that instance, it would have taken the entire federal workforce to piece the puzzle together and it still probably wouldn't have succeeded,” he noted.