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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."
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.
Remember, when grep is outlawed, only outlaws will have grep
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Throw in Sam Donaldson and I'll hold its coat and applaud.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
I think that many people are hostile towards this kind of system not because of what it is (basically a computer indexed newsmedia database), but who has control over it - and more importantly, who doesn't.
Imagine the web without search engines, just a bunch of sites connected by links. Then, imagine that the CIA created a massively expensive and elaborate project (call it project GOOGLE) to index, cache, and analyze all the content on the web, and make it searchable. Of course, project GOOGLE would be highly guarded and only government officials could use it, leaving everyone else to wonder uneasily what the government was learning about them through their database.
That would be creepy, because it would mean the government would have an effectively God-like view of all activity on the web, while everyone else would be in the dark. Make such a project publically available and transparent (like the real Google), and it's accepted almost universally. Of course, you could argue that people should build their own AI-driven newsmedia uber-database, but the reality is that the US government is probably one of the few entities with the massive resources and will needed to create something like this, which means that by definition the rest of us will be left in the dark.
In a nutshell, I think the crux of the issue is that folks don't trust the US government, so every time the government proposes a new way to expand their power, people immediately jump on the ways that it could be abused. This, I believe, is as it should be.
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.