Role of AI in Cyber Crime and Hampering National Security

Abstract

“The development of full AI could spell the end of the human race.. It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution, wouldn’t compete and would be superseded”
Stephen Hawking


With the advancement in technology there has been a significant shift towards developing artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, AI can be considered as an advanced algorithm that can mimic human brains. It can be found in all aspects of our lives, the most quintessential example can be Alexa, Siri or any social media platforms. AI can be considered as more of an enabler to a constellation of technology and law is constantly trying to catch up with this rapidly developing field. Though the process isn’t easy because the changes are taking place everyday but there has been a continuous effort to keep pace with it. With overt use of the internet there has been a significant rise in cybercrimes i.e crimes related to the internet. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are gaining more popularity than human efforts when it comes to dealing with any cyber crime because they can quickly and easily analyze millions of events and can detect a multitude of threats in minimal time. The significant rise in cyberattacks costing billions and hampering the state security calls for something more than just human intervention. Though, AI has various advantages it also has the potential to push towards a dystopian society where the human world can get to the verge of being destroyed at the hands of all-knowing machines. Since, they are not entirely capable of understanding the repercussions, despite being trained to resemble human minds. Stephen Hawking astutely observed, that if they are given too much control, they may end up dominating us. Therefore, it is crucial to take each step towards this advancement carefully. AI has been used both for committing the crime and also for protection against it. The U.S Supreme Court tried to define the internet as “an international network of interconnected computers” and also talked about cyberspace as “something that has no geographical location but is available to anyone anywhere”. Since cyberspace has no geological boundaries it gets difficult to establish jurisdiction which is essential for law to operate. When something can be accessed by anyone from anywhere it gets difficult to establish as to who is responsible, for example in the case of Yahoo! Inc v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et L’ Antisemitisme the question before the U.S court of appeal was whether to enforce a French judgement against Yahoo. Because of lack of geographical boundaries it gets difficult to establish which state law will prevail and to what extent. The jurisdiction issue persists everywhere where internet is used as a medium of crime, the use of AI has also been considered by the Defence Sector in surveillance, cyber security along with Lethal Autonomous Weapon System (LAWS) for safeguarding national security. AI has found its way in not just the life of general public but countries are using it to upgrade their military capacities as well. Where developed countries use AI extensively, it gets essential for the developing nation to adopt the new technology to keep up with them.

This paper aims to look into the relation between artificial intelligence and cyber crime along with use of AI in national security.

The paper focuses on two main issue:
1. Cyber crimes committed using AI
2. Implications of crime committed using AI on National Security