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US Govt and Private Sector Developing "Precrime" System Against Cyber-Attacks
An anonymous reader writes A division of the U.S. government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) unit, is inviting proposals from cybersecurity professionals and academics with a five-year view to creating a computer system capable of anticipating cyber-terrorist acts, based on publicly-available Big Data analysis. IBM is tentatively involved in the project, named CAUSE (Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment), but many of its technologies are already part of the offerings from other interested organizations. Participants will not have access to NSA-intercepted data, but most of the bidding companies are already involved in analyses of public sources such as data on social networks. One company, Battelle, has included the offer to develop a technique for de-anonymizing BItcoin transactions (pdf) as part of CAUSE's security-gathering activities.
So, all we need to do is find three pre-cogs, put them to work and when two of them agree on a scenario we drag the perp in... simple!
This is what I hated about "Minority Report". The point of the movie was that "pre-crime" was a bad idea. But the only negative thing about it was their absurd over-reaction to each prediction. Instead of "dragging the perp in", and incarcerating them for something they didn't do, they could have just prevented the crime, warned the potential perp to be more careful next time, and then let them go about their business. If they had just used the pre-cogs responsibly, it would have been fine, and they would have had a mostly crime free society.