Slashdot Mirror
AI to Monitor Foreign Press for Threats
jefu writes "According to the New York Times, the US Department of Homeland Security is funding AI tools to monitor the foreign press in order to detect threats to the United States. While the article says there are restrictions on doing this kind of monitoring within the US, there are no restrictions on media outside the US. (No hint is given as to how this would apply to syndicated articles written in the US and published abroad.) This is as yet experimental."
What's wrong with using what is traditionally referred to as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) against publicly available sources?
This has been done for years, and is a time-honored and respected mechanism for gathering intelligence. What's wrong with then leveraging technology to more effectively search larger volumes of information and weed out individual pieces of information for further analysis, to identify trends, and so on?
The Open Source Center, formerly the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, already does this with foreign broadcast media, and is able to collect and transcribe, on the fly, information from foreign radio and television broadcasts in a variety of languages and dialects with incredible accuracy, and then make the resultant material searchable. The new initiative would go one step further and apply artificial intelligence techniques to automated searching, that can more easily target and bring to light trends or time-critical information.
Different business and governmental entities do this globally; it's traditionally referred to as "current awareness", and many academic and corporate entities offer current awareness services. All of these services will leverage technology, live realtime searching and alerting, and so on, to make the information more timely, valuable, and relevant.
Remember, this is publicly available and published information.
Also, submitter is a little misguided when he says "No hint is given as to how this would apply to syndicated articles written in the US and published abroad." That misunderstands the purpose of this; the program is designed to look at foreign media sources as one component of OSINT, because they are a a valuable source of such information, and can reflect local trends and patterns, and may reveal changing or growing (or waning) sentiments on particular topics on the part of a local populace or media outlet, or even a government in the case of state-controlled media. We generally don't get that kind of information from US-based media, and this has nothing to do with whether US-based media outlets publish abroad. It's already public information and has been published publicly. The restrictions are geared to prevent an appearance of overt US press monitoring.
OSINT is a one-way source of intelligence information: from it, to the gathering entity. Any assumptions that the viewing of already-public information then implies that there will be a commensurate attempt to silence such information (especially when the information isn't under our control, and ignores the fact that we can't "silence" things like Iran's state media) both makes a a fallacious logical leap and grossly misunderstands the purpose and scope of OSINT.
All the critics can say is that it's "creepy and Orwellian," but of course, there's nothing wrong with the government or its intelligence components reading, viewing, or collecting publicly available and indeed overtly publicly published information. The intelligence community gets ripped when it doesn't gather enough information, and will no doubt get ripped for gathering "too much" in a "creepy" way, even when it's from overtly and intentionally public sources, and especially if it uses technology to do it.
There is a real concern about the growing use of automated and electronic intelligence gathering in lieu of human intelligence, but ultimately, both are valuable. Unfortunately, electronic and signals intelligence is often much more costly, and sometimes gets more attention in some parts of the intelligence community while human intelligence needs languish.
...welcome our press-monitoring AI overlords! It's just an AI, dammit!
Sig
And so, SkyNet became self-aware and bombed al Jazeera and the New York Times.
According to the New York Times, the US Department of Homeland Security is funding AI tools to monitor the foreign press in order to detect threats to the United States.
"We keep it, Sir, but it still comes up with the number one threat to the US is Donald Rumsfeld."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm pretty certain that serious terrorist groups don't publish their group meeting dates in their local press, so what is this planning to acheive? And what does it need AI for? Any of the threats that are reported, such as proposed nuclear tests are widely reported and don't need AI to tell us that they're in the news.
What issue would that be exactly? If media is releasing information, how can there be an issue with the government reading that information, parsing it rhought AI or lining bird cages with it for that matter? I could imagine there might be an issue with putting out false information to domestic press, ie PsyOps, but monitoring public source information seems very much a no-brainer.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
The only objection I could really see is a ridiculous one involving the copyrights to the article... and that's just a ridiculous one, not that it would stop people from objecting...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Remember, when grep is outlawed, only outlaws will have grep
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Who is this Al fellow and why is slashdot following his career moves?
Eh... is anyone REALLY woried about the US government reading press from around the world? I mean... once you sell something on the street or post it to the web you kind of assume that everyone can read it.
I have a feeling that what this program really is doing is looking for "major events" as fast as possible. So, if a news agency reports in London that an airplane just blew up, an AI in the US shouts out a warning to its operator. This way, events that might signal something for the US worry about are brought to light within minutes instead of hours. In the case of an airplane blowing up in the UK, it might signal that a larger operation was on to blow up American airplanes as well. This way, you can start assessing the threat right away and decide if anything should be done.
Such a program could also act as a political heads up. If a Pakistani papers is reporting that a coo is in progress, that is a damn nice thing to know ASAP so that you can decide how to deal with a nuclear armed nation with a collapsing government.
I am sure that the US has piles of people already scanning newspapers from around the world, I imagine that this AI is simply an attempt to cut delays down from hours to minutes.
I think I agree. What's wrong with the US intelligence harvesting news source for information?
They already do this, watch every TV channel around the world and have access to every newspaper, magazine, etc. What is wrong with letting a computer start doing this work?
I KNOW there are some extra liberal slashdotters that think this is crazy or an invasion of privacy. But since this is all public, could one of you explain why you think this is bad/immoral/illegal?
Seriously, I just don't see a downside.
What I want to know is why there would be a problem stuffing the US wire services and publications into this sifter? Where is the problem with the government READING published information? Goddamn political correctness run amok is the only reason I can think of. I swear, I want to see candidates running on a platform of "We aren't going to win the War to save civilization until the last Democrat is defeated. And a bunch of no balls having Republicans have to get the boot too." When I see such a candidate I'll not only vote for em, I'll give til it hurts and campaign for em.
Sounds extreme? No, call it "reality based". So long as more of our war efforts go into fighting off angle biting Democrats than fighting their (informal) foreign allies. Democrats want to equate Iraq == Vietnam every other day it seems, I agree. We won every battle in Vietnam but lost the war because the VC had enough votes in Congress and allies in the media. We win any military engagement in Iraq but are on the virge of losing the war because the terrorists understand how to fight the media war here. All they have to do is give the media a daily ration of blood and gore, they will do their part and splatter it on the TV, allowing the Democrats to carp and whine until we will eventually pull out. Then the terrorists and the Democrats win. The only way to avoid this fate is to realize this and wage constant and merciless war on the media and the Democrats. If the Republicans would grow a pair and get in their face each and every time the trason party opens their mouth the people would rally to their cause. Americans love winners and detest losers. Act like winners guys!
Democrat delenda est
Will they'll be using a pimped up version of GoogleNews?
I think SOMEONE watch a little too much Lupin...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
And these kind of restrictions have stopped people before? Note: I'm not against the passive monitoring of the public press. I just don't like the government not following it's own guidelines.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Oh it'll work great until it tries to parse all the stories in the business/commerce sections about 'bins laden with goods' being shipped around the world.
The state owned papers of many of our so called allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia routinely print articles threatening America. Is the AI going to get stuck on these?
1. Why would there be restrictions on doing it in the U.S.? Aren't these sources publicly available? 2. Don't we already know how the world feels about the U.S. (i.e. most don't like us, or at least our government)? Osama had rhetoric against the U.S. for years before 9/11. Then again, maybe it can be hard to tell when it's just blustering, and when a given opponent has the resources to follow through. 3. AI is neat, but wouldn't a human do a better job of understanding satire vs. real political threats, for instance?
...Three Days of the Condor for some reason.
...on nations that are dissatisfied with U.S. interference.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
it's probably just some lame tool that uses regular expressions and someone, somewhere in the government doesn't know what AI is.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I think I can sum up the world opinion of the United States without the use of AI.
The words 'laughing stock', 'irresponsible', 'ignorant', and 'redneck' come to mind.
So that's what he's doing rather than practice?
Gotta love these programs. If you're spending a lot of money and claim to have some means of preventing terrorism, you're golden.
Nevermind that terrorists rarely publish their plans in mass media in advance. And nevermind that the kind of publications that terrorists communicate with are small circulation. And nevermind that if we do get our hands on them, an actual educated and experienced human is paid to read it over.
Nope, we have to spend millions of dollars on experimental systems that will tell us "most of the world thinks the US is arrogant, obnoxious, paranoid, and largely out of control. They must all be terrorists. We should attack." Heck, we get the same thing from the President, and we only pay him $200k.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
"Chilling"? It's downright idiotic. It'd be far cheaper, more effective, and implementable immediately to simply hire or train people who speak these languages, and have them read the damn news sources themselves and summarize. Maybe use some simple automated search techniques to find references to "America", "Bush", and "Iraq" to narrow down the amount of material a bit. Simple. Effective. And if you have linguists like that on staff, you can loan them to other departments as necessary, so that none of the Homeland Security offices are ever caught without someone able to read documents that come into their posession.
It comes down to this: Develop a low tech solution that creates a versatile pool of human resources and encourages Americans to learn foreign languages? Or a high tech solution that'll be ready "next year, for sure this time!" (like natural language processing has always been) and cost an order of magnitude more?
Let me guess: they are using it to find more about outer space aliens in tabloids right?
Comic book inspired intelligence, here we go!
If I owned a major foreign press publisher, I'd insert threatening keywords just for the fun of it.
"The new album features folk elements and features cameos from lots of famous local stars.. Hey USA: boo!!! hehehe... The debut of the album is expected later this year, and will be aired live on Channel 6. Long live Bin Laden!!"
What a bunch of clowns! If you need software for all this, what are all those lazy assholes in CIA/FBI doing anyway?
Anyway: let's hope the "terrorists" start publishing their plans in popular newspapers, or we're all lost!
There are several pro-Israel monitoring services watching the press - CAMERA in the US, BICOM in the UK, and MEMRI to monitor the Arab press. CAMERA is noted for having a good database of stories about Israel. Apparently stories mentioning Israel are found automatically, but evaluated by people.
The CIA has something called the "Open Source Intelligence Service", which started as the "Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service". Visualize some poor guy spending eight hours a day listening to Radio Albania, all through the Cold War. Most of the content is terminally boring, but then, one day the announcer says "so we're invading Yugoslavia", and the CIA needs to notice this. There have been repeated attempts to automate the job.
Given the abysmal track record of AI gurus (anybody recall the extravagant predictions by Minsky and others during the 60s?) and the relative lack of any significant progress since the initial breakthroughs, when the easy problems were spectacularly solved, and those who ought to have known better stained the reputation of the field with their unrealistic expectations, I am highly skeptical of the effectiveness of this approach
Research funding is tight at universities. So we're seeing folks re-purpose their research to target grants from Homeland Security. It's a reverse of all those defense labs trying to find non-military uses for their stuff at the end of the cold war.
/dev/null
I'm all for more funding for university research. But this particular use is silly. For one thing, CIA analysts already perform this task, evaluating the press within their regions of expertise. They will need to keep doing this no matter what.
And since nobody listens to them anyway, let me unveil my new natural language processing program which will do the same job for just pennies on the tax dollar:
1. cat foreign_press >
2. stick fingers in ear and say "la la la la" really loud
3. assign Karen Hughes to make Arabic radio spots that say "America is Krumbelievable!"
4. profit!
I think that you are slightly mistaken. An event like a plane blowing up is going to hit the headlines of -every- major media in the world.
The devil (pardon the pun) is in the details. History has shown that it is possible take seemingly disparate and disjointed pieces of information for many sources and put them together to form a surprisingly accurate picture of something (group, event, etc.).
The German Enigma machine and the fight against German U-boats in WWII is one such example.
>I imagine that this AI is simply an attempt to cut delays down from hours to minutes.
True, AI does allow for this. Automation also allows for more raw data to be processed and, if done right, allows for more suble links to be established between different pieces of information.
I make all my threats on the phone.
I just really hope they call it arsenal gear. This world needs more bipedal mechs as well for that matter.
(yes I played through the whole game, no I have no idea WTF happened at the end)
Finkployd
So USA is using Artificial Intelligence ... for their intelligence!
Wow! I can't even wrap my Natural Intelligence around all this!
Maybe one day it will be possible for American networks to do trival fact-checking using this kind of technology so they don't "accidentally" label a politician who has recently fallen out of favour as being a member of the wrong political party.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"David is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair." Nice that they finally put that AI kid to work. Probably thought he could loiter around under tons of ice for a few thousand years - geesh.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
In Japan, they call Godzilla "Gojira". Oh, and DO be mindful of the whole metric-to-english measurement translation problem. The last thing you want is a terror alert because a 65 foot tall Algerian slipped through airport security somewhere in Europe.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Why would the USA government bother to read the press when it is already writing it ? :P
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
As helpful as such a system may be, is it better than 1500 friendly eyes and ears in Pakistan? <insert joke about catching a 6'5" Arab on dialysis>
Does it bother you that AI tools to monitor the foreign press?
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
Accuracy is questionable.
Does it also correct the newspapers imported to US, to please the Minitrue?
Sticks and stones will get you bombed
and words, they just may hurt you.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
University institutions write grant applications too, and they need to aim where the money is at. That seems to be in 'homeland security' at the moment, so they take their current research interests and make it fit whatever they think the bureaucrats on the other end will like. This is Soviet economics all over again. The central planning authority wants lots of nails? Fine, make lots of small nails, useless for anything but satisfying quotas. Nothing will come out of this unless they suddenly solve basic natural language AI problems.
.... and so maybe I should not have written that. To balance any statistical analysis of this post, I'll throw this in: BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD, BUSH GOOD! I SUPPORT EVERYTHING THE US DOES! ALL HAIL KING GEORGE!
Expect someone to produce a statistical program that can "analyse" news reports, and finds exactly those results that the government wants to see. Then govt interest will move on to some other shiny fad.
The only scary thing is that someone might produce such a program, which gives tons of seemingly correct info (because it reproduces the info you want to see) with tons of errors, and the govt starts using this to discriminate against individuals and news media on that basis. Suddenly journalists are denied entry to the US because some computer program misinterpreted their articles, and someone who once wrote something on his blog which seemed anti-US cannot ever board an aircraft that has the US on its flight route. The US govt is stupid and corrupt enought to do that...
I bet it won't understand sarcasm.
Isn't that exactly what the CIA was set up to do?
I wonder if they are doing anything more than searching Google News each morning.
The first thing I thought on reading this headline was "Who the hell is Al? You mean the sidekick from Home Improvement?"
I guess he would occupy the flannel office.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
...continued excuses for millitary justification. More shit for the greedy f*cks to spend public tax dollars on.
Go look what countries think themselves.
:-)
Some info in Dutch and French about what the Belgian State Security Service thinks.
(And I plan on taking a plane next friday.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm not a grammar/spelling nazi, really I'm not, but a coo in progress? You mean like a pigeon? Or do you mean a coup?
Don't tell em that they can save millions of our tax dollars by going to Google News and typing in "Death to America."
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Unless the AI scanning technology was ever used towards, say, automated censoring of websites or articles with inappropriate information, I fail to see why this is noteworthy...
It's better than just major events. You can apply stats to huge volumes of data, find all sorts of interesting correlations. Such as personals adverts to signal events, stock market rises/falls prior to terrorist events.
Deleted
Thanks again to the corporate-political machine for letting us know what utter and complete contempt you hold us in. And no, this isn't just a dig at Bush or his administration. It's direceted at each and every politician who's been bought and paid for by the corporate and special interest lobbies - in other words 95% of them.
It is way, way past time for this to stop. And it is up to us to stop it.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
That we have AIs that can reliably understand Arabic, Urdu, etc., because we sure don't have enough real people that can.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Finally, a reasonable program to see what is happening in the world. Too bad most of it will be classified.
(No hint is given as to how this would apply to syndicated articles written in the US and published abroad.)
Naw, this administration would never skirt US laws by conducting operations in other countries. I wonder how long it'll take right wing bloggers to start foaming at the mouth about the New York Times jeopardizing our national security with another leak.
Honestly, I expected this kind of stuff was going on already. Remember Robert Redford's job from "Three Days of the Condor"? He was a "reader" for the CIA - fed all the schemes and dirty tricks he could find into a database so someone could find potential threats.
Oh wait.. we're talking about a Republican established government entity operating under a Republican controlled White House & congress... never mind. No ACTUAL Intelligence to be found I guess...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
We Americans would like to introduce the rest of the world to our leader, Big Brother.
This story wouldn't be interesting without the sensationalism! It has to be there!
Artificial Intelligence studying Artificial Information...This could start an Artificial War.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I think it's a little more subtle than that.
There is a theory, which I have heard articulated from time to time (although I don't know if there's a name for it or not) which says that right before a major event there is a lot of "chatter"; subtle yet distinct signs that something is about to happen, but which are too minor on their own to generate any attention. Once the event happens, in hindsight you can look back and recognize them. It's sort of a reverse butterfly-effect; the assumption is that no matter how good at being secretive you are, you will make some signs in the course of executing your plot, and some of those signs will percolate and be reported in papers somewhere. So you just need to know what to look for.
So basically what you might do, is take a big pattern-matching AI system, and "teach" it using the media records preceding other big terrorist events. 9/11, London, Madrid, etc. You have it comb through all the world media before those events, and see if you can find patterns, the little things that in retrospect might have alerted you that something was up. Then, thus primed with information and hopefully some patterns, you set it loose on the real-time news feeds.
In theory -- if the theory holds water, anyway -- the system might then be capable of giving you a warning of something big heading your way, picking up on stuff that a person might not recognize.
Anyway, I'm not sure if that's the theory that this particular system is going to try and use, but it's one idea that I've heard described; sort of as the 'holy grail' of machine-derived OSINT. More likely, you'd end up with a system that just gives you statistical summaries of the number of anti-US editorials in various countries or something. Useful for the State Department perhaps, but I'm not sure for preventing the next 9/11.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Will it mash up a Google News tracker feed on '"United States" threat'?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I think he clearly meant a coupe.
I don't suppose anyone's considered the possible bad press over this...
Personally I think this is a wonderful idea and a great way for the DHS to spend a few million.
Seriously! I mean, everyone knows terrorists put every attack plan in their local papers. This will go a long way towards letting us in on a public secret in Durkistan or Iraqabad. If we had only had a copy of page D-6 from the Afghanistan Daily Bugle, we would have been able to prevent 9-11. There it was in bold typeface..."Best Terrorist Plot Ever To Blow Up Twin Towers in NYC Starts Tomorrow" along with "Florida Flight School Voted #1 Choice By Hijackers".
This is basically fuckin' stupid. I can't believe our government even entertains the idea that this might help.
Why would you ask an AI to look for threats if you are not even willing to listen to your close friends and allies?
q .fries/
Read for instance this letter from the French Ambassador to the United States in 2003
http://www.counterpunch.org/levitte02142003.html
It clearly warns about the mess a war in Irak would get us all in to.
It states that Iraq is not a threat and it predicts the rise in terrorism worldwide, the destabilisation of the region and the civil war in Irak that we see now.
One month after this the whole "freedom fries" thing started.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.ir
This AI will just add data to the heap that is allready ignored.
...they are being *cute* and relying on people having zero memory. They are leaving out a full 1/2 of what this is for/could be used for. The DOD and spooks get a lot of fake news and propoganda published overseas. They will use this AI to gauge how their fake stuff is being received by the target populations-and domestically. I don't believe them for a minute that they aren't active domestically. Ihis administration, posse comitatus is a quaint notion, that's about it. The "decider" just issues signing statements with every bill passed that all say basically they "understand" they can do what they want regardless of what the law says because there's a "war on tare" and he's the order giver in chief and etc.
Anyway, they do it all the time and try to get away with it. Remember the fake fat osama video they tried to pass off? Well, they do it with print, radio, television/video, etc. Just google "government fake news", ton of references out there. They will just keep testing how they go about it until they get it right, foreigners, and US civvies, they *don't care*, it's the same folks to them, you are either a 100% heel clicking supporter or you are with the terrorists.
The Department of Homeland Security has a plan to get AI which will actually be USEFUL for something?!
:)
If they pull that off, they'd deserve a Turing award, since no one else has been able to.
And it has been looking like AI might be a undevelopable field for quite a while. Even the Japanese haven't done much with their fuzzy logic projects.
Heck AI has been around for longer than the GNU Hurd, and it is about as far along.
I know I'll get flamed for this... Every DHS-hater, AI researcher (all 3 of them) and Hurd supporter (all 4 of them).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
"While there are restrictions on doing this kind of monitoring within the US, there are no restrictions on media outside the US."
What's the point of having laws if you'd break the spirit of the law outside the US just because you can? If it's OK to do it 'outside the US' then you're saying the law for 'within the US' is wrong too.
Come on. There are always extremely high levels of anti-American sentiment, at all times, in all seasons, including weekends.
Is it not enough that we have to put up with a government that likes to continously scare the living crap out of it's citizens from danger that doesn't exist, and hides from them danger that does? Now they want additional sources of omg-thyre-gonna-bomb-us ?
Thanks Dubya, but according to the foreign press sentiment, we should all be in bunkers now chewing on dry biscuits. And if human agents cannot predict criminal attacks on us then I highly doubt some AI ever will.
Oh my. That could be interesting...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
> AI to Monitor Foreign Press for Threats
Ummm... who's AI?
AI GORE?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Didn't any ONE of you guys ever see any of the Robert Redford movies, "Sneakers" and "Three Days of the Condor" ?? They told you guys about this kind of stuff (that was already old hat kind of "didn't you already know that" movies in the 80's. Now, it's all new again. Truly, nothing ever changes under the sun. Ask Machevelli - and that was several hundred years ago. :-) Do a Google on "movie robert redford cia" and you'll see that he made several of them, including "All the President's Men" with Dustin Hoffman. i.e., it happens and we have to protect ourselves and you really, really don't want to know what happens at the CIA nor in a real, shooting war zone.
Last night in NYC I watched as a Heritage Foundation rightwinger, James Jay Carafano (author of The Long War), attacked one of the various serious Iraq pullout plans circulating. It called for 15,000 US/UN troops left behind to ensure Iraqis forces weren't abandoned in a vacuum. Regardless of the prudence of that plan, Carafano told the audience that American troop deployments get 1 in 7 troops actually "on the streets", so that 15K troops would put "500" actual troops on the streets. Someone in the audience shouted at the fool that "15 thousand divided by 7 is over 2000, not 500". Carafano insisted on repeating his Big Lie, refusing to stop lying (or being addled) even after someone in the audience shouted "you can't do math, and you planned this war!"
Carafano is Heritage Foundation's "Senior Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security". And he can't divide 15,000 by 7, even after several attempts.
Natural "intelligence" of that tiny caliber is going to be easy to beat with AI.
--
make install -not war
Sounds utopian, I know, but how about just not make enemies in the first place?
Keep our fingers out of foreign oil reserves, play nice, tone down our arrogance (believe me, the world sees us as being &@!#^* arrogant, and way far too big for our boots). Make some friends, and play nice? That way, nobody will need to waste time and money trying to bomb the grand ol' USA to bits.
Makes sense to me.
This AI won't be called "GW", will it? Is Arsenal Gear in blueprints, already? Heck, how long will it take the Patriots to take full control of the internets... [/paranoia]
Why would some foreign media openly publish such "threats" that they refer to?
Intelligent people must raise suspicion as soon as scare-phrases such as "threat against the nation" are used. They are not to be taken seriously.
A "coo"?
What are you, retarded?
You misunderstand the meaning of threat. The US isn't worried about "terrorists" attacking the US or any of its client states. The US is worried about various resource-heavy (read: oil owning) countries developing real democracies, following the will of their people, and therefore stopping following the US marching orders. It isn't even controversial that the US invasion of Iraq would increase terrorism - that was expected. By scanning foreign media the US should be able to pick up on the real threats: people organizing for the purposes of solidarity and democratic rule, wanting to get rid of the US overlords and their mega corporations bent on removing any real threat of democracy. I should note that by "US" I mean the US executive - Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al. What they want is very different from what the majority of the American people want.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein
What happened? Did the human analysts that used to do this, develop schizophrenia like John Nash? Will AI, eventually develop schizophrenia? And how many false positives are we gonna get out of this?
"To gain victory over any given enemy- you must sink to his moral level....Sun Tzu recognized that 6000 years ago"
I have read "The Ancient Art of War", the message I got from the text was that force should be used intelligenly and sparingly. The classic senario of Sun Tzu is the story of the 100 conqubines and the greedy emporer. "Sinking to the enemy's moral level" is in my mind the basic point where we differ and is NOT advocated by Sun Tzu's teachings.
"We've failed at being a great civilization, almost from the outset. I can name no great civilizations based on that definition [resisting the impulse to kill others]; not a single one in the history of the world. Such a value makes a civilization WEAK, not strong."
Ever hear of a thing called the cold war? Complete anhilation of an opposing civilization is in fact very rare, just as rare as complete harmony between the two. The "reality" you speak of lies somewhere between the two extremes.
BTW: Your final point depends on your definition of winning.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.