AI Case Study

"A journalist determined to shed light on an FBI operation that saw US Muslim families spied on for two decades is using artificial intelligence to fill in the blanks in a heavily redacted trove of 33,000 documents she forced the bureau to release.

Algerian-American filmmaker Assia Boundaoui ​had been investigating the bureau's covert surveillance of her Illinois Arab community for two decades before 911.

Determined to get to the bottom of what the documents contained, she hit on the idea of using artificial intelligence to scan past releases by the FBI to triangulate the information that has been taken out.

The AI program, called the Inverse Surveillance, is being conducted as part of Ms Boundaoui's fellowship at the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. It will analyse hundreds of thousands of documents collated by the bureau on people of colour over the past 100 years, and will reveal historic patterns on tactics it used during operations such as COINTELPRO, which it launched to carry out surveillance on the civil rights and black power movements led by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It will also be based on historic surveillance of Arab, Latino, Asian and indigenous communities in America.

“The idea is to understand patterns the FBI uses, tactics they’ve used on communities of colour, how they ran these operations and why," Ms Boundaoui said.

“On a general level, I want to understand how the FBI operated for the past 100 years in communities of colour and why they’ve chosen to ‘otherise’ these communities. On the other hand, it’s really basic, I want answers to my questions, including: why did the FBI focus on my community?

Ms Boundaoui, who spoke to The Independent at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London – where her documentary about Operation Vulgar Betrayal, The Feeling of Being Watched, had its debut – said that once it was developed, the AI tool would be used to stage temporary public art installations.

She said her team had demonstrated it using “guerrilla art intervention” last October by projection-mapping redacted documents superimposed with family home videos over the FBI's Hoover Building headquarters, aiming to “shine a light on the secrecy that shrouds the systemic mass surveillance of Muslims in America”.

The algorithm, she said, was a step closer to demonstrating how technology had the power to manifest radical transparency in such a climate of shame.

“Surveillance gets its power from secrecy and the best way to bust it is to not be secret about it, to talk out loud about it," she said.

"So it’s been very powerful, not just for people who have experienced this in the Muslim community, but for general audiences to share what happened, and to not keep this dirty secret any more”."