Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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.
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...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Not to be confused with Darknet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet which is what I immediately thought from this article title.
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..."
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.
Of course, when you register to DarkWeb, you give your identity. Obviously, 5% of registered people didn't enter their real identity.
Now, the biggest problem is to get terrorists to register to and use that DarkWeb thingy. But with such a kewl name and a good advertising campaign, it shouldn't be too hard.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Can someone please figure out a way to weaponize a cure for cancer?
You mean kind of like how there are now lots more skilled laser eye surgeons in the private sector competing to give you better prices for your business because once the military decided to back providing that service to its pilots, there was a giant leap in people being trained to do the work during their rotations?
As far as cancer: the military provides all kinds of basic medical research from which we all benefit. You'll see considerable military spending in epidemialogical studies, trauma treatment, etc. To the extent that, say, The Marine Corp is a weapon, the huge studies that can be conducted on the systematically collected health stats, DNA, etc., on a huge number of generally healthy people over several generations IS a part of all sorts of cancer (and other) studies.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I call the FBI about all of my neighbors, just in case. I recommend you do the same.
It's better to be safe than sorry; why, just the other day, I saw some guy walking suspiciously down the street. I'm not one to overreact, but this guy was just suspicious if you know what I mean. He looked like he came from the Middle East, had shifty eyes, the full shebang.
So I'm walking along and I see this guy. I almost kept going, minding my own business, but I thought about the danger this proud nation is in and I thought to myself, "If I don't do something, who will?"
And thank god I did.
I called 911 (blessed may that number always be in our hearts) and reported the likely perpetrator. I tailed him from a distance for a while, and my if he wasn't surprised when that officer pulled over next to him! You should have seen the look in his eyes, caught in the act!
So, long story short, turns out the police couldn't arrest him for anything (or he got off on some technicality, probably). I know one thing: he'll be more careful next time he decides to pull something. You've got me to thank for that.
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.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Oh, awesome... thanks for making sure he'll be more careful at his nefarious deeds. You've done us all proud there, Scooter.
SIG: HUP
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.
...And the locals would have welcomed the British with open arms...