You can find below our recently accepted work in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society (IEEE TTS), entitled “The Invisible Arms Race: Digital Trends in Illicit Goods Trafficking and AI-Enabled Responses” and authored by I. Mademlis, M. Mancuso, C. Paternoster, S. Evangelatos, E. Finlay, J. Hughes, P. Radoglou-Grammatikis, P. Sarigiannidis, G. Stavropoulos, K. Votis and G. Th. Papadopoulos.
IEEE Xplore link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10813620
techRxiv link: https://d197for5662m48.cloudfront.net/documents/publicationstatus/172323/preprint_pdf/0c0b4fd6fc2829d348d624ed262a606c.pdf
This work constitutes a nice example of highly inter-disciplinary research contacted within the context of the EC-funded Ceasefire Project.
Recent trends in the modus operandi of technologically-aware criminal groups engaged in illicit goods trafficking (e.g., firearms, drugs, cultural artifacts, etc.) have given rise to significant security challenges. As a result, a lot of scientific effort has been expended on handling these challenges, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the forefront of this quest, mostly machine learning and data mining methods that can automate large-scale information analysis. However, such practices unavoidably give rise to ethical and legal issues, which need to be properly considered and addressed.
This paper is the first to jointly investigate AI-enabled countermeasure developments and related ethical/legal issues, without focusing on a particular angle or type of illicit goods trafficking. In particular, it emphasizes how advances in AI both:
- Allow the authorities to unravel technologically-aware trafficking networks
- Provide countermeasures against any potential violations of citizens’ rights in the name of security.