Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
...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.
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?
My first thought, not having RFA: Does IARPA start with a capital i or a lower case L?
LARPA might make more sense.
Steve
"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.
As far as I know, In-Q-Tel is an investment fund, providing venture capital for strategic companies. IARPA is a research grant agency.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Everything starts with an e.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
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.