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

Attention NSF

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:5%

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.