NSF-Funded "Dark Web" to Battle Terrorists

BuzzSkyline writes "The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on 'advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyze extremist activities online.' The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."

Comments

5%

[king-manic]

The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."

So when they get it wrong, and the police storm my front door instead of my neighbors, will it still be "cool"?

Re:5%

[Jarjarthejedi]

I'm more curious how they're going to get 95% accuracy on who the person is without a large number of samples of non-anonymous writings from them. It seems obvious that they're really claiming that, with a large number of writing samples from the writer, they can get 95% accuracy. If they're actually claiming to be able to determine who anonymous people are without any non-anonymous writing by them then that's a system I have to see...

Re:5%

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely it'll be along the lines of "These anon posts seem to be from the same person, and we should make more attempt to trace several of them to their source, rather than wasting our efforts on those over there..."

Re:5%

[colmore]

The worst thing is that for a search like this, 95% accuracy is TERRIBLE.

Let's say in 1,000,000 posters there are 20 secret terrorists. This system (assuming the 95% figure isn't just made up, and since it's a reliability figure coming from a government contractor - it is) will label 19 of the real terrorists as terrorists and *50,000* innocent internet users as terrorists. Since we already live in a world where being under government suspicion (but no charges) gets your assets frozen, phones tapped, and puts you on the no-fly list this is a BIG problem.

I go to a fairly international university. I've seen this 1984 B.S. shit on innocent people's jobs and educations first hand. As long as our elected representatives keep granting themselves and their officers these kinds of powers, we do not have the right to call ourselves the "land of the free."

Right now the US has in place a set of laws that would allow for an authoritarian (not-quite totalitarian, though if the press keeps dismantling itself, who knows) government. All it would take is the decision to enforce them to the letter; no consent from the voters would be needed.

This could have been used...

[halivar]

...to out Dan Lyons as "Fake Steve."

Other than that, I'm afraid this is the sort of technology that's only "cool" when it isn't being used on you.

F or A?

[Slightly Askew]

Change NSF to NSA, and the summary would make just as much sense...except "terrorist" would be defined as whatever the current politicians in power decide it to mean.

Space race, nuclear power, this kind of technology. Just goes to show, if you have a good idea, find a way to use it to further the war machine and political agendas and prepare to get buried in money. Can someone please figure out a way to weaponize a cure for cancer?