Sentient (intelligence analysis system)
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Sentient is a heavily classified artificial intelligence satellite intelligence analysis system of the United States Intelligence Community, operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and developed by their Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate (AS&T), with the United States Air Forces Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Department of Energys National Laboratories.[1][2][3][4][5]
Available information describes it as a complex automated system that allows Intelligence agencies of the USA and the United States Armed Forces, and other artificial satellites in Earth orbits to track in real time any objects detected or photographed, and to automatically repurpose with artificial intelligence and machine learning the tracking of targets, and to even decide which targets are worth tracking.[2][3][1][4]
Known public records of Sentients development programs and process date from 2009-2010 onward.[6][4][7] NRO emails from 2021 dicslosed that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), which later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was involved with the NRO and the Sentient program.[8]
History
A later declassified May 2009 report to the Congress, "FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification, Volume IV," contains details about the National Reconnaissance Offices plans for real-time and updated satellite signals intelligence, providing context on NROs space-based missions and programs to collect data, such as Sentient, which would initially begin soliciting defense and related industry feedback in 2010.[9][6]
The US is arguably more reliant on overhead collection than ever before. To a large extent, satellite reconnaissance is the foundation for global situational awareness, and as such, it is an essential underpinning of the entire US intelligence effort. Space collection provides unique access to otherwise denied areas to provide persistent and responsive collection; and it does so without risk to human collectors or infringing upon the territorial sovereignty of other nations. It is also enables users to quickly focus on almost any point of the globe to rapidly respond to emerging situations or to monitor ongoing events. The NRO provides direct support to the war on terrorism, deployed military forces, and other IC and DoD activities requiring near real-time situational awareness and sustained high resolution/high sensitivity collection capability 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-per-week.
The NRO continued to explain to Congress its goals:[10]
These AR&D activities enable evolutionary and revolutionary capability improvements to current and future GEOINT, SIGINT, Multi-INT, communications and ground systems. The Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate continues to aggressively pursue innovation in technologies, architectural options, and acquisition approaches. AR&D efforts are focused on rapidly, and effectively, developing these technologies to improve our capabilities in the following six areas:
- (U) Persistence: Means and methods to monitor subjects and areas of interest whenever desired for as long as necessary to detect, track, and understand patterns of activity and behavior.
- (U) Broad Area Coverage: Search large areas of interest to detect unanticipated targets or patterns of activity and geolocate them to cue precision collection by other sensors.
- (U) Phenomenology: New sources and methods for detecting non-traditional observables from targets of interest.
- (U) Value-Added Information: Networked, high bandwidth communications and collaborative processing services to enhance our ability to share, fuse, and extract timely, actionable information.
- (U) Spatial, Spectral, and Sensitivity Extension: Increase technical performance for collection against weak signals and low reflectance targets in dense clutter and co-channel interference backgrounds.
- (U) Innovative Technologies and Capabilities: Foundational, cross-cutting technologies to reduce cost, improve overall system performance, and decrease time-to-market.
- (U) AR&D efforts are further aligned in six distinct activities: Basic Research, GEOINT Technology, Crosscutting Technology, and Phased Array Technology Maturity.
The earliest known public references to Sentient date to 2010, when the NRO put forward a public request for information (RFI) white papers on the concepts that would become Sentient.[1][9] The request for white papers requested:[9]
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is interested in receiving RFI White Papers for the Sentient Enterprise Program. Three RFI's are being released in the following areas:
- RFI 1) User Interaction Technology
- RFI 2) Self-Awareness and Self-Directing Algorithm Technology
- RFI 3) Cognitive Processing for Automated System Processing and Cognitive Processing for Automated Data Analysis
Official NRO documents from 2012, declassified in 2019, describe it as "an on-going Research and Development (R&D) program, which is managed and operates out of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)".[4] NRO documents detail the Sentient program was in some form of initial development from 2013 through 2016.[11]
Public details
NRO Office of Public Affairs official Karen Furgerson reported to The Verge in 2019 that:[1]
"The NRO has not said much about Sentient publicly because it is a classified program and NRO rarely appears before Congress in open hearings. It ingests high volumes of data and processes it. Sentient catalogs normal patterns, detects anomalies, and helps forecast and model adversaries’ potential courses of action. Sentient is a thinking system. Sentient aims to help analysts ‘connec t the dots’ in a large volume of data."
The program architecture was developed to demonstrate advanced technologies and techniques to revolutionize the current Tasking, Collection, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TCPED) cycle across the Intelligence Community (IC).[4] The Sentient methodology represents a fully integrated intelligence approach consisting of three fundamentals: problem-centric intelligence multi-INT end-to-end and trusted machine automation.[1] Sentient utilizes "tipping and queueing", described as a method to coordinate multiple discrete sensor systems to optimize real-time monitoring over large areas from multiple systems; coordinating in effect multiple satellites to hand off and coordinate tracking of targets as the target leaves the area of one set of satellites and enters new areas.[12][13] A principle purpose of the Sentient system is described by the NRO as compiling at machine, versus human speed, synthesis of complex distributed data sources for rapid analysis faster than humans can manage.[14]
In 2019, a declassified National Reconnaissance Office document detailed Sentient as:[7]
(S/TK/REL)The Sentient program being developed in the Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate (AS&T) is the power of Information Technology (IT) to bring new capabilities to tasking and analysis. Sentient is a fusion of leading-edge Multi-INT technologies joined into an automated, end-to-end, integrated capability. Sentient collects vast amounts of complex information, buried in noisy data, and the relevant What once teams of now uses automation to the information flow, enabling quicker, well-informed decisions. Analysts can focus on situational understanding instead of through data-working smarter, not harder.
(U) Sentient will continue to investigate various alerting schemes and tasking methodologies for improving overall employment of NTM imaging capabilities. Through and machine learning, Sentient will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of NTM collections. By incorporating diverse situations,technologies, and collection Sentient will substantially improve the intelligence value of the NRO constellation, providing the analytical community with timely, relevant intelligence.
The NRO described Sentient in declassified 2022 collateral as:[8]
Sentient is an AS&T research and development framework that enhances the GED operational framework. Sentient emulates key elements of the NRO's existing and future ground architecture. The framework is anchored around a problem-centric overhead system tasking and collection process that employs to support an adaptive closed-loop cycle.
- Faster identification, characterization and behavior predictions of targets and activities
- Data-driven decisions for future ground architecture
- Improved tasking, collection, processing, exploiting and dissemination efficiency through correlation of larger and disparate data sets
- Perspective and buy-in closed-loop ground solutions
The NRO lists among the advantages and challenges of Sentient as:[15]
"Sentient's activity-based collection provides significant advantages over schedule-driven collection. Sentient tradecraft and culture must also be acknowledged as being significantly different from the norm by the IC in that it is shifting toward activity-based collection versus being primarily schedule driven."[15]
Betty J. Sapp, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, described the Sentient program to the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces as:[12]
"Our Sentient program--a 'thinking' system that allows automated, multi-intelligence tipping and cueing at machine speeds-has been focused against many of our most challenging mission sets, resulting in new intelligence information that human-in-the-loop systems would have missed. Our Future Ground Architecture will leverage Sentient, and create an integrated cloud-based enterprise that will share tasking and intelligence products quickly across each of our ground sites, increasing both performance and resilience.[12]
According to Robert Cardillo, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the system is intended to use "automated inferencing" to aid intelligence collection.[16] Cardillo summarized Sentient in 2017 as:[16]
"The Sentient program is a research and development effort, conducted jointly with NRO, to experiment with automation that ingests data, makes sense of it in the context of an intelligence problem, and then infers likely future intelligence and collection needs... The approach is to continue to introduce automation in the processing arena that will support automated inferencing, and therefore, faster tasking for future collections."[16]
The Verge described Sentient as “an omnivorous analysis tool, capable of devouring data of all sorts, making sense of the past and present, anticipating the future, and pointing satellites toward what it determines will be the most interesting parts of that future.”[1] Quoted in the Verge, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and the Project on Government Secrecy, said of Sentient, "It could include electronic intercepts of international communications; it could include prior imagery; it could include human sources."[1] In the same report, retired CIA analyst Allen Thomson stated, "As I understand it, the intended — and aspirational — answer is ‘everything,’" and said that in 'addition to images, that could include financial data, weather information, shipping stats, information from Google searches, records of pharmaceutical purchases, and more.'[1]
Known US Government stakeholders
Declassified government ocuments have detailed that United States Government stakeholders involved in Sentient include the:[15][5][8]
- United States Air Forces Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Defense Intelligence Agency
- Department of Energys National Laboratories
- National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- National Security Agency
- Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or UAPTF (later renamed the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO)
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force involvement
The National Reconnaissance Office revealed in 2022 that the Sentient program had involvement with the United States Department of Defenses Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) in tracking and research of unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as unidenfitied anomalous phenomena or unidentified flying objects.[8] The emails from June 2022 disclosed the NRO working with still-classified military or intelligence staff from another part of the government to track UAPs/UFOs in their Sentient imagery systems:[8]
From:
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2021 8:41 AM
To:
Subject: RE: Sentient R&D support to UAPTFClassification:
SECRET//NOFORNGood morning,
NRO's Sentient R&D as a UAP Model to look for UAP in imagery, but we need an external customer to ask for it to be turned on.
And you are our primary customer.
So would you mind assisting us.
v/r
Declassified NRO UAP reports
In June 2022, the NRO declassified and released two unique and redacted reports on Sentient activities.[2][3] Both documents detail an incident involving Sentient detection activites at "0038:17Z" ("Zulu time", equivalent to UTC).[2][3] The "Recent Sentient Highlights" report details on page 2 that the Sentient program captured telemetry of a UAP/UFO, compared by government officials in the official report to the "Tic tac" UFO involving the USS Nimitz, which was revealed in 2017 by the New York Times after being disclosed to them by former military official Luis Elizondo:[17][3]
(S/REL)At 0038:17Z 6 May 2021, Sentient image processing detected a possible airborne object ~78km southeast of
(S/REL)The object was small (<10m), and did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections
- The object did, however, vaguely resemble similar detections of airborne objects by US Navy aircraft and surface vessels in the Operating Areas ("Unidentified Aerial Phenomena")
- There is a rough similarity to the previously-reported "tic tac" shape
- The object was likely not a sensor artifact or focal plane anomaly (although more in-depth imagery analysis is warranted)
(TS//SI//TK//REL)There were no correlating tracks present in reporting, nor was there any correlating ELINT/SIGINT in reporting, despite time-coincident access/collection
- Sentient detections did, however, detect the presence of the prob in the same imagery ~25km to the west
- In recent reporting1, the has been associated with command-and-control (C2) activities, as well as more traditional telemetry and space functions -- the simultaeneous presence of this high-interest vessel is notable, although possible merely coincidental
(TS//SI//TK//REL)Confidence is relatively low in this detection, but the potential linkage to similar phenemenon off of may warrant further investigation
See also
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
- Automatic and controlled processes
- Automatic identification system
- List of NRO satellite launches
- Reconnaissance satellite
- Space Development Agency
- Space-X
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h Scoles, Sarah (2019-07-31). "Meet the US's spy system of the future — it's Sentient". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ a b c d "
((S//REL))Sentient Operations Highlight: Detection of Possible UAP near 6 May 2021" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2022-06-02. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-03-21. Retrieved 2024-06-04. - ^ a b c d e "
(S/REL)Recent Sentient Highlights 6 May 2021" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-06-04. - ^ a b c d e "Sentient Program" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2012-02-13. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-08. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ a b "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2009-05-01. p. 217. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
- ^ a b "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2009-05-01. p. 1. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
- ^ a b "SENTIENT" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-01-22. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
- ^ a b c d e "NRO Official declassified release June 2022" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2022-06-22. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
- ^ a b c "Sentient Enterprise (Request for Information)" (PDF). System for Award Management sam.gov (formerly fbo.gov), on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2010-10-20. Archived from the original on 2019-09-14. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
- ^ "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2009-05-01. p. 215. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
- ^ "Sentient Overview 2017" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2012-02-13. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ a b c Sapp, Betty (2017-05-09). "Director National Reconnaissance Office, Statement for the Record" (PDF). Betty J. Sapp on the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces archives. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-09-23. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ Ali, Muhammed Irfan (2021-01-28). "Tip and Cue Technique for Efficient Near Real-Time Satellite Monitoring of Moving Objects". ICEYE. Archived from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ "SENTIENT Challenge Themes" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2019-02-09. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ a b c "NRO Campaign Plan For Sentient" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States. 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-20. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ a b c Cardillo, Robert (2017-03-16). "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love our Crowded Skies". The Cipher Brief. Archived from the original on 2019-05-15. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- ^ Cooper, Helene; Blumenthal, Ralph; Kean, Leslie (2017-12-16). "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2017-12-16. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
- Automated reasoning
- Global surveillance
- Government databases in the United States
- Intelligence analysis
- Intelligence assessment
- Mass intelligence-gathering systems
- Military intelligence
- National Reconnaissance Office
- National Reconnaissance Office satellites
- Non-combat military operations involving the United States
- Secret space vehicles
- Signals intelligence
- Surveillance databases
- United States intelligence operations