Ukraine is a very effective proving ground for using modern information technology in wartime, from satellite dishes to smartphone apps, Eric Schmidt, the former Google boss, said on Monday.
Schmidt, now the US government’s adviser on artificial intelligence, told reporters after a 36-hour visit to the country that the civilian technology sector is vital to Kiev’s defense.
The proof came the day after Russian troops invaded on February 24.
After a long deadlock, Ukraine’s legislature convened to agree on a crucial step to protect all government data from Russian hackers and attacks.
“One day they had a parliament session and they changed this law… they moved all their data from government servers in Kyiv to the cloud,” Schmidt said.
“The war has given everyone a political excuse to do the right thing,” he said.
The second crucial step came with US tech billionaire Elon Musk’s donation for access to his satellite-based broadband system, Starlink, effectively shielding both the public and Ukraine’s military from a Russian attack on telecoms.
Musk andspender sent about 20,000 ground terminals with small dish antennas that enabled everyday transmissions and helped fighters target data. An important goal by the Russian attackers was thwarted.
“Elon Musk is really a hero here,” Schmidt said. “This thwarted the opposition’s strategy of shutting down the Internet.”
– Field Intelligence from Citizen Apps –
The citizens have now directly integrated two apps, said Schmidt.
A feature called “E-Enemy” has been added to the popular Diia app, which is used for government services and allows people to report things like damage from shelling or sightings of Russian troops.
And an encrypted Swiss chat service called Threema allowed users to send such data to the military without revealing their identities.
The military would receive thousands of such reports every day, Schmidt said, and filter them with artificial intelligence programs.
“You would use computer intelligence and human intelligence to target them and eventually track them,” he said.
“So if you think about it, here’s what they had: They had an internet that was operational, they had their government data protected,” and a way for citizens to give them intelligence, he said.
Long an incubator of programming and illegal hacking skills, Ukraine has a sizable IT workforce that has been able to launch cyberattacks against Russia and break into their communications.
The country has also cleverly used biometric and facial recognition techniques to identify Russian troops involved in atrocities such as the Bucha massacre earlier in the war.
In addition, Ukrainian programmers were adept at making drones useful for war.
“I can only report that the Ukrainian tech industry really made a contribution to the front lines due to my small amount of data,” said Schmidt.
