With federal investigators targeting increasingly complex transnational criminal organizations, artificial intelligence (AI) has become extraordinarily helpful, saving agents months of detailed financial analysis, a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said.
DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), for example, employed AI in a current investigation of a famous person that yielded terabytes of financial information, said Peter Hatch, principal assistant director in HSI’s Office of Intelligence.
“The team said we used AI to structure (the information),” Hatch said on Nov. 12 at the GDIT Emerge: Protect the Homeland event in Washington, D.C. “I asked how long it took. They said it took three days … it enabled us to structure and then map some transactions that we could later manually verify.”
Hatch then asked his team members how long the process would have taken in the pre-AI era. “One of them said three months, and then the boss came in and said this would have been so difficult, we wouldn’t even try it.”
As AI use accelerates across the government, HSI is one of numerous federal agencies using the technology for mission-specific applications. HSI is DHS’s principal investigative arm, responsible for investigating transnational crime and threats.
Hatch emphasized that human skills remain vital.
“We have a saying that AI does not make a bad agent into a good agent,” said Hatch, who leads more than 1,200 intelligence professionals in his DHS role and previously served more than 30 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. “AI makes a good agent faster.”
That speed is critical, Hatch said, to keep up with the increasingly fast and complex drug smuggling and other transnational criminal organizations that HSI investigates. “Everything is evolving,” he said. “If you’re not quick, if you’re not adapting, then you have investigators and analysts and leadership looking at a new problem.”
He added that criminal organizations “are more complex – they’re using every tool that comes out in the market, including in some ways they weren’t designed for. They are just becoming very multifaceted. A smuggling organization is not just a drug smuggling organization.”
Yet even as HSI embraces new technologies, a key part of its mission focus remains something more old-fashioned: Embracing partnerships with other federal agencies, along with state, local, and foreign partners.
With a single drug cartel potentially employing more than 25,000 members, “you can’t (investigate) that alone,” Hatch said. “You need key partnerships…and you have to release that control over cases.”
“The threat is too big to not work with people,” he noted.