Readout of the Criminal Division’s Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in the Justice Department

The Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) co-hosted the Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Justice Symposium in Washington, D.C., at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Oct. 2.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Criminal Division, kicked off the symposium by delivering a keynote speech describing the promises and perils of artificial intelligence (AI) and announcing a new Strategic Approach to Countering Cybercrime that is part of the division’s plan to combat cybercrime and other offenses enabled by emerging technology like AI.  The Strategic Approach emphasizes the division’s focus on using all tools to disrupt criminal activity and hold criminal actors accountable, developing law and policy to prevent and prosecute cybercrime, and promoting cybersecurity through capacity building and public education. 

As part of the Strategic Approach’s focus on developing law and policy to prevent and prosecute cybercrime, PDAAG Argentieri announced the division’s support for the UN Convention on Cybercrime, which the department negotiated along with its interagency partners to address the need for international cooperation on combatting cybercrime while protecting civil rights.

In addition, PDAAG Argentieri announced that, as part of the Strategic Approach’s focus on promoting cybersecurity, the division will engage with external stakeholders to update CCIPS’s Vulnerability Disclosure Framework to foster the responsible use of vulnerability testing and reporting and to account for the need for good-faith security research into AI systems.  As PDAAG Argentieri noted, such research can help identify systems whose operations or outputs are unsafe, inaccurate, or ineffective for their intended uses and can protect against potentially serious harms to individual rights.

A newly released Fact Sheet illustrates the recent enforcement actions that CCIPS has taken in furtherance of its Strategic Approach.  Since 2021, CCIPS, working with domestic and international law enforcement partners, has:

• Disrupted seven of the most prolific ransomware variants, including by seizing their infrastructure and distributing their decryption keys to victims—thereby saving victims from having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom payments;

• Ended the operation of a malicious proxy service, three criminal cryptocurrency money laundering or transmitting services, two major hacker forums, and two online criminal marketplaces — thereby disrupting criminals who were using those services for narcotics trafficking, computer crimes, identity theft, and child exploitation;

• Liberated more than 20 million computers from botnets or other forms of malicious software; and

• Publicly announced the conviction of over 100 defendants in connection with schemes involving ransomware, malware, criminal marketplaces, and cryptocurrency.

The symposium was attended by members of government, industry, academia, civil society, and the public, and a recording of the livestream is available on the symposium webpage.