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.'"
This week's NCIS: LA.
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.
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.