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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."
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
I didn't want to load the post with questions but I wondered in particular what natural language understanding techniques could provide that Google News (and other news aggregators) does not already provide - certainly the trending information available seems particularly interesting. I also wondered if the language understanding is really all that strong for other languages (including specifically Arabic since the lack of Arabic speakers has come up as newsworth a number of times) - especially in US universities. A deeper problem might be to distinguish between anti-american attitudes and anti-(american-president-and-administration)-attit udes. Finally, I found the mention that specific journalists attitudes might be tracked a bit troublesome - would this be used then to deny visas to journalists who consistently manifest anti-american(-president-and-administration)-attit udes.
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."
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.