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Intelligence Agencies Turn To Crowdsourcing
An anonymous reader writes "IARPA — the sister agency to DARPA — is sponsoring researchers to examine crowdsourcing as a method to derive better intelligence predictions. This research will eventually be transitioned to the intelligence community to improve national intelligence estimates. From the article: 'Like Darpa, its better-known counterpart in the Pentagon, Iarpa funds far-out research ideas. However, Iarpa works on ideas that could eventually be used by the likes of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), rather than the military. “The goal that Iarpa has is to eventually transition this to the intelligence community, and use it for something like the National Intelligence Estimates,” says Jenn Carter, who works on the project.'"
First crowdsuorced 3d printed psot on the way to the singularitehEleventyOne!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hmm somehow reminds me of the NCIS: LA episode from tuesday.
This week's NCIS: LA.
S.I.A.: Search for Intelligent Americans.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Really? Crowdsourcing from an agency that is supposed to keep secrets? I'm really not sure who this is going to be worse for; the agency for unwanted transparency or the citizenry because they are making it cheaper for others to violate their privacy.
http://forecastwe.org/
You can join the study here.
Things I learned were, why Russia and Egypt thought NGOs were using social media to foment revolution and how that might be done. How totoly saturated the newsfeeds are with military propoganda and how thouroughly the feed is know days in advance by intelligence agencies. Realy a fascinating way to see into the security hive mind of the US.
Think AI algorythms modifyied chatbots steering perceptions faster than the news cycle based on emerging soical dynamics, dynamics modified on the fly by chatbots based on feedback loops.
It seems to me that a majority of the cases overturned for bad evidence, especially death penalty cases, involve jailhouse informants, infiltrators, citizen reports, eye-witnesses and other HUMINT that may or may not be of value.
When you set the bar to entry very low, such that just about anyone can fire up a computer and report someone else, you're going to see lots of spurious reports which are methods of personal revenge. Just like in the Salem Witch trials, or the Soviet Union, if you create an easy way to identify "bad" people and take their stuff, it will be abused.
It's not surprising that giving police departments the power of seizure (and sale) had a similar effect. Busting rapists takes a second-tier to busting rich drug lords, because it's intelligent to ensure funding for your department first and later take on the non-paying cases.
This isn't to say that crowdsourcing is "wrong" but that we should step carefully when we implement any open-to-the-public reporting program.
".... It was also heavily criticized for its National Intelligence Estimate in 2002, which supported claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...."
So basically an idea to sell to the crowd that it is listening to their feedback. I doubt it. I am pretty sure that any intel agency with a budget is aware of most of the important stuff before we are.
The BBC is touting some tripe as to what the people across the pond are doing? It seems more like a way to soften their failures in light of the agenda to preserve their incursions into citizen monitoring.
I wish Slashdot would turn to crowdsourcing for its headlines.
From the article (and article summary), the IC isn't turning to crowdsourcing. An research agency funded a research grant to see if it's feasible for the IC to consider using crowdsourcing methods to improve the analytic cycle.
I understand I'm just an AC, but for the benefit of anyone else coming along:
What's the difference between IARPA and In-Q-Tel? Aren't they both searching-for-ideas organizations? Why is IARPA a .gov and In-Q-Tel a .com?
...all the few who persist on warfare need to be constrained in some psychopathic mental institute not called government. Don't know about anyone else but I don't approve of my tax dollars being spent the way.
Why am I suddenly thinking of "Citizen CIA" by the Dropkick Murphys?
Yes, let's get a bunch of people to help them build something better to spy on us with.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If I wanted to blow something important up, or take down a web site, I would make absolutely sure that the prosess was untraceable as possible. Average people use the intenet and by and large, they have no plans to perform terrorists acts. If they do, they don't post these plans to their facebook accounts. I would like to just state this now: If I were planning any sort of cyber terrorism, real terrorism, you will not find any markers on my social networking accounts. You could only possibly discover such info by finding and decoding my encrypted data. Since I no longer own a Blackberry...my highest level of encryption is Exchange through my iPhone. It's an idiotic waste of resources to search through unencrypted data. You should focus on the things people are trying to hide. Because you can't, you're wasting resources in the effort to scare the norms. They're already afraid. You need to scare the people who send data in a subterfuge fashion by letting them know you can now track them. If I have enough money or authority, I can suck all the data I want from data mining services. No one says anything important there.
For a second there, I thought the title says they'd turned to cross dressing. That would've been more interesting than this article anyway. Let me know when they try that as a strategy - maybe it will be more effective than crowdsourcing.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
The Soviet Union also used 'crowdsourced intelligence gathering' to catch enemies of the state.
Maybe they're finally starting to understand that??? Could it be??
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/
Why would they waste money on Crowdsourcing technology?
Please select one option. The following image likely depicts:
[ ] a terrorist
[ ] a used car salesman
[ ] Osama bin Laden
[ ] other
Thank you very much for your cooperation!
My first thought, not having RFA: Does IARPA start with a capital i or a lower case L?
LARPA might make more sense.
Steve
Please mark if any of the following is true (you may choose more than one option):
[ ] my neighbor does not have an American flag in front of his house
[ ] my neighbor speaks Spanish or a similar language of unknown origin
[ ] my neighbor drives a Japanese car
[ ] my neighbor does not like Barbecue
[ ] my neighbor does not play Baseball
[ ] my neighbor looks sort of Indian or wears a turban
[ ] my neighbor listens to loud rock music during daytime
[ ] my neighbor does not seem to watch TV
[ ] my neighbor has asked me how to obtain bombs
If you have checked more than one of the above items, your neighbor might be a terrorist. Please contact your local DHS representative immediately!
"We have no intelligence! I repeat, we have no intelligence!"
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Video doesn't load for me. IE switched to compatibility mode after I refreshed the page to try and get the video working. Only the ad for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" ran then the real video I wanted to see would not load.
I worked for a small company in Huntsville, Alabama 2001 to 2005. During this period we had an SBIR contract to do "Prediction Markets" research and development to do this sort of work. One Sunday I read on /. that the Senator from Idaho (Remember the bathroom incident!) was screaming that we were betting on assassinations etc. Honestly we never would have done so. This was whole cloth fabrication and lies. In fact the project had not gotten out of the lab into public at all! Monday I arrived at work early. I got a phone call from C-Net and their reporter wanted info. I told him he would have to wait and refered him to my boss when he got in. This was 6am Central Time. By 8am when the Boss arrived the phone was ringing offf the hook with people asking questions. I had told the C-Net guy that I could say that this was silly and after all you bet against your own life when you buy life insurance so even the claim was out of line. I was quoted in at least 2000 news storie with that one remark and none of those reporters who acted like they were reporting actually called. They just read C-Net.
By 9:30am the US Government had pulled the funds and stopped work! This was just nuts! Accused by lies and stopped instantly. People need to remember this story and understand the power of a US Senator. Bluntly this project is today is and ours was essentially similar to the Iowa Electronic Markets. It works and is proved technology.
There is a lot of intelligence in such and Google has made their living mining such data sourcing.
You could open up an information market on SIPRnet and do a pretty good job of filtering through the noise of the uninformed. This market would likely suffer from group think, and the same self reinforcing trends responsible for bull and bear markets. A scary thought when a declaration of war is a potential outcome.
The other issue with this would be select government employees of Bradley Manning's persuasion deciding to create the news that they have predicted by using their position to undermine US interests. It's a very James Bond plotline, but there are undercurrents of truth to these ideas. The bottom line is that such an information market gives a direct incentive to the very people best able to prevent 9/11 type events, to look the other way in the hopes of getting paid on skyscraper bingo.
If you can overcome these difficulties(which will not be apparent until they have created problems because of faith in humanity) then you are not much better off from where you started. The information pool is the same as before so no new intel is created, but simply digested and a new incentive exists to rip pages out of library books from the competitive nature of the idea.
So you run two markets simultaneously? One public, one secret? You've expanded your information pool, but considering the disproportionate influence of the media on public opinion, instead of Jim Cramer directing market movements, you have O'Reilly and Olbermann's dueling banjos competing for bets in the current events horse race.
In my opinion, because of the financial impact of significant national security events, the information market already exists on wall-street. Trying to create a sportsbook dedicated to the specifics only muddies the waters, although if I were DARPA, I would be interested in creating one on I2P and the .Onion networks just out of curiosity. Could turn in to Fast and Furious II pretty quick though.
Why not set a just neural network loose on Al Jazeera and that region of the world where experimental groups are so frequently available? Feed it banking records, cell phone positioning logs, and traffic patterns. The closer you can aim the telescope to a known involved player, the more likely a poker tell will be identified, and the more likely this blinder will result in an "aperture problem" where greater threats escape the field of view.
Signal to noise ratio. Narrow perspective vs. a wide net.
Everything starts with an e.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Showed us what "Crowdsourcing" can do when it comes to identifying dangers to society.
Break out the torches and pitchforks boys. We're gonna have us a lynchin'.
Yee Haar
Crowdsourcing, as in getting people to voluntarily list all of their contacts, their whereabouts and photographs of all their known associates in an electronic, easily searchable database?
Web 2.0? More like intelligence gathering 2.0.
So.... life imitates art? Or at least thinks about it.
Of course, Vernor Vinge's Vision of amateur intelligence assessments does indeed ignore the old adage that 98% of everything is crap. The internet pushes that number a good deal further. We're talking 5 nines of crap, here. By the time you've waded through all the crap generated by people whose tinfoil hats are too tight, you've spent more money than just paying a real agent.
Still it's a good book. It was available as a free download from http://vrinimi.org/rainbowsend.html, posted by Vinge, but it's no longer there.
So how exactly does one crowdsource?
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
===
The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities" ...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&cid=37016386
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.