TAMPA — A Defense Intelligence Agency team is using artificial intelligence to map the shadowy production-and-distribution networks of synthetic drugs that kill most of the 47,000 Americans who die of opioid overdoses each year — and in the process showing how military and law enforcement will put AI to work.
Tracking fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, which can be made almost anywhere, is harder than tracking cocaine, which is processed by relatively few cartels in relatively few places in South America, said Brian Drake, DIA's director of artificial intelligence for future capabilities and innovations.
“We can estimate those [cocaine] production numbers because we have lots of data that comes over a long period of time and there's only so much land mass that is arable for cocaine,” Drake told attendees at the annual DODIIS conference here on Monday. But geography imposes few limits on the production of synthetic drugs. Further confusing matters, illegal producers often masquerade as legal ones.“It can be produced in any quantity you need. So how do you estimate a drug marketplace where you don't have the primary mathematics in order to estimate that?”
Drake’s answer: massive correlational analysis. His program, called SABLE SPEAR, ingests data from 43 million websites, eight million of the cargo receipts dubbed “bills of lading,” a billion satellite images, and about 20 other data sources. Algorithms help researchers to draw connections that would otherwise be invisible.
For instance, those 43 million websites? They contain clues about the businesses that import materials to make the drugs and the method of sales. “We...extract things like emails, phone numbers, physical addresses, business records. From that information, we then correlate that against those [satellite] images and then say, `Yep, that's a place o ..
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