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'Google Search On Steroids' Brings Dark Web To Light
snydeq writes The government agency that brought us the Internet has now developed a powerful new search engine that is shedding light on the contents of the so-called deep Web. DARPA began work on the Memex Deep Web Search Engine a year ago, and this week unveiled its tools to Scientific American and 60 Minutes. "Memex, which is being developed by 17 different contractor teams, aims to build a better map of Internet content and uncover patterns in online data that could help law enforcement officers and others. While early trials have focused on mapping the movements of human traffickers, the technology could one day be applied to investigative efforts such as counterterrorism, missing persons, disease response, and disaster relief."
"... being developed by 17 different contractor teams..."
There's a recipe for failure if even I saw one!
I thought that this sounded ominous for a minute. Then I remembered that government projects like this are designed to have a chilling effect on activity that they cannot monitor, understand or enforce by their very existence and not by being actual potent tools to combat it (i.e. paper tiger). More likely this thing will become a money pit that contractors can use as a sandbox project to allow their employees to play in for implementation of IP that may be works-in-progress for future projects that may be useful, but are just lofty concepts that have no basis in reality. 17 contracting teams is about 15-16 too many hands in the cookie jar for this to be anything more than a Men In Black-wannabe training camp or a glorified propaganda project, most likely both.