The Intelligence and National Security Alliance -- or INSA -- is arguably the central networking nonprofit for the U.S. Intelligence Community. And its summits are sometimes even formally tied to classified briefings.

In the opening keynote of a video recording of INSA's March 8th Summit which was published this morning, an Associate Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency disclosed that the Pentagon's controversial artificial intelligence drone warfare effort -- Project Maven, which was taken over by the NGA's Data and Digital Innovation Directorate in January 2023 -- was deployed by "a military partner who, in fact, took some of these technologies to Europe under the banner of our monitoring of the Ukraine crisis". (Beyond a lunch sponsored by Oracle and a snack break sponsored by Google, Google Director of Strategic Initiatives Joshua Marcuse was also a speaker. As was a member of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, which Tech Inquiry yesterday reported as advocating for its "close friends" impacted by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.)

According to NGA Associate Director for Capabilities Phillip C. Chudoba, Maven is "presently, the only performant computer vision A.I. and M.L. program in the DoD" and its goal is to decrease the time required to find and attack a target from hours down to less than ten minutes, "so that we can execute those find, fix, and finish cycles before our competitors can leave the target area". (Reuters reported last month the data fusion intelligence contractor Palantir -- a prominent Project Maven contractor -- was "responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine".)

Chudoba traced back the deployment of Maven in Ukraine to the XVIII Airbone Corp's Scarlet Dragon exercises run by Erik Kurilla, who became the leader of U.S. Central Command in April 2022. According to a later keynote by the former director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Michael Groen, Kurilla is an "AI enthusiast" and the experimental A.I. programs underneath his CENTCOM umbrella within the Navy and Air Force (Task Forces 59 and 99) are direct results of Project Maven.

Chudoba's opening keynote was followed by the only off-the-record session of the summit: a panel on "Technology and disinformation/misinformation" whose participants included the Acting Director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center, Jeffrey Wichman, as well as prominent disinformation researcher Renee DiResta and Graphika CTO Jennifer Mathieu. But public records show that Graphika's subsidiary, Octant Data, was paid $748,352 by the U.S. Air Force for an ongoing contract on "detecting, forecasting, and countering Chinese Information Operations (IO) to undermine the national security of the United States".

The only public session with a focus on information operations was the closing panel, moderated by the former Deputy Director of the CIA's Open Source Center, Kristen Wood. One of the panelists, the founder of the NGA's open source initiative "Tearline.mil", Chris Rasmussen, explained that one of the Congressionally mandated priorities of Tearline is "to crank out more Tearline and public content on China's malign activities and get it into the public space". Tearline's website asserts that the project "builds on the precedent of the CIA World Factbook", and Rasmussen described in the panel how the scope includes "shame and blame" pressure campaigns on Uyghur abuses and providing information to "officers at Nike".

Another member of the closing panel, Devon Blake, explained how her employer, gig-work surveillance contractor Premise Data, is a substitute for "boots on the ground in remote areas" to help avoid "mis and disinformation" as well as to monitor "potential protests". Blake also recounted her time as the commander of Army Europe's 66th Military Intelligence Brigade during the 2016 to 2018 pilot of a "multi-national" force "looking east" which "debrief[ed] Ukrainian soldiers...that were coming off of the eastern front. And that was not in the news.". "That program eventually turned into Northern Raven...they are tremendously effective right now for the efforts in Ukraine."

Tearline founder Rasmussen also promoted the usage of satellite imagery collected from frequencies outside of the visual spectrum by commercial firm Hawkeye 360, which is advised by former NGA Director Robert Cardillo. Rasmussen's reference to Hawkeye 360 appears to complement Chudoba's claim that the U.S. has "a heavy reliance on non-[electro-optical] imaging systems to see what's happening [in Ukraine]...Our reliance on some of the radar capabilities kind of has been driven home."

Tech Inquiry was pointedly rejected from attending the INSA Summit on the grounds that we are not "confirmed press". But, to paraphrase the opening keynote of NGA's Chudoba, "[professionals] watch the tapes".