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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."
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.
Indeed. It's clear to me that the current administration has pretty much forgotten the importance of human intelligence, instead relying on high-tech gadgetry (and, of course, fear) to protect the nation.
For yet another example of an utter failure of human intelligence, check this out: Report: Terrorists' mail not well monitored in US prisons. We can't even monitor the mail being sent to and from *convicted terrorists* because we don't have enough people who speak Arabic and other middle-eastern languages. Better to build a no-fly list so that Cat Stevens can't spread dissent, and depend on magical computers to keep us safe.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.