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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."
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"?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
...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.
Not to be confused with Darknet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet which is what I immediately thought from this article title.
Attention, NSF: Here's a better, cheaper solution - point all those @#$@#$%ing existing VIAGRA and mortgage spambots out there at these forums you're monitoring.
Either the terra'rists give up after the spamming, or they kill the spammers. Either way, we win.
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?
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
Every TCP/IP packet has a source address and a destination address.
So all that the government would need would be the addresses of the web sites (no matter where they are located) and taps on the pipelines. You can either try to catch the stuff going OUT of your country or going INTO their country (if you can't just tap the line of that website).
That will tell you who, in your country, is going there.
As long as it isn't using encryption, you'll even get what is being read/posted.
If it is using encryption, you still should have the location of the guy reading/posting. Or you can try cracking the encryption.
Once you have the location of the guy, you get a warrant and put a keylogger on his box or whatever.
There's no need for all of this crap about "darkweb". Google can already tell you what is posted on what websites. If these guys are smart enough to beat the basics, they're smart enough to know NOT to use the Internet for point-to-point communications.
Sure you can crawl any information source and extrapolate anything you want out of it. I'd even be willing to believe the 95% accurate analysis, whatever. That's besides the point.
You can only extrapolate data you've read properly. The simplest of encryption and/or obfuscation schemes applied to this content would effectively protect against extrapolation. Sure, Big Brother can have software scrub the Net looking for suspicious content. But can they have software scrub the Net while applying decryption measures to everything found? While analyzing every image file for obfuscated content (or even something as simple as writing your terrorist plans on a piece of paper and scanning it in as an image)? While applying rot13 to every block of text found?
I would say no. The problem becomes computationally impossible at that point. There are theoretically infinite ways to hide, encrypt, or obfuscate data. To have a system check first for unhidden, unencrypted, un-obfuscated data, then also for each of those, is simply not doable unless one makes radical limitations to the format of the data itself.
I would say instead that this "Dark Web" will be invaluable in identifying characteristics of perfectly law-abiding forum posters, slashdotters, and so forth, and that the data gleaned will fetch a good price from directed marketeers, pharmaceutical companies, spammers, government bureaucracies, and other servants of the Dark Lord.
Back around 1776 there were a large number (about 20% of our population) of "Loyalists" who opposed our Independence.
If you had polled England at the time, and those Loyalists, you'd understand that the "terrorists" had control of the "colonies".
If England had won, every one of those "terrorists" who had signed their little "Declaration" would have been hanged. And their would have been rejoicing in the streets of the colonies.
They just need to pull up their own employee roster to see who's largely responsible for world terrorism.
Of course, the young recruits are probably still too busy puffing their chests smartly while humming the "Alias" theme music while quietly wishing that the NSA was the one which received the big Hollywood PR/propaganda effort to notice such sticky details as who was responsible for what. But what are a few sticky details? M's and W's all look the same.
-FL
...And the locals would have welcomed the British with open arms...