Slashdot Mirror
Spotting And Culling Terrorist Groups On Social Media: Pipe Dream, or Possibility? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Can Twitter Spot Terrorists and Put Them In Jail? Hany Farid, the chairman of the Computer Science department at Dartmouth University, thinks so. He told the New York Times that there's "no fundamental technology or engineering limitation" to spotting terrorists on the Intertubes. In other words, he's figured out how to tell the difference between bragging terrorists and kids who are just joking about being "da bomb." Can artificial intelligence make these distinctions? Or will it generate a ton of false positives? Or is Prof. Farid just trolling for more grant money to make Dartmouth the premier department for spying on social media?
If Google and Facebook can target me with ads for male enhancement, breast implants and Elmo . . .
Wikipedia has an auto censoring mechanism called the "abuse filter", which just gets innocent users blocked, while vandals get through.
Or is Prof. Farid just trolling for more grant money
If you want an infinite pool of grant money in electrical engineering in the UK, you go for something with clear defence applications. I expect similar applies for IT.
What I find embarrassing in all this is that there is really nothing stopping thousands of people being shot every day by lone wolves except that people are generally not that shitty. And when there is propaganda to drive people to do horrific things that they would not normally do, it doesn't come from the DEEP DARK OMG WEB (you have to really want it in the first place to look hard for it there, by its very nature), but from regular media pounding the TV/radio/web sites with news about previous attacks and the threat of the enemy, marginalising and factionalising and dividing and conquering (while arms are sold to both sides, and politicians take great advantage).
Here's the thing: terrorism is not a big threat in Western nations. In fact, world violence is at a relative low. What is at the highest of highs, however, is the ability to quickly set the narrative for news, getting people to panic about all the appropriate things, then turning their attention to some new event to stop them reflecting too much.
At least at a certain level, with Anonymous taking out thousands of pro-Islamic State Twitter accounts with Operation Tango Down. Now that's just one service, and nothing prevents them from signing on again. But you can slow momentum and make it harder for supporters of terrorism to broadcast their views to supporters without reprisals, and also limit or prevent coordinated action.
Best of all, it's possible to do it merely for Terms of Service violation, without government action.
Of course, to actually defeat terrorists, you have to kill them faster than terror organizations can create new terrorists, and to dry up their financial support (of which the Islamic State has plenty in "moderate" Sunni states...)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The article below this one is full of 'Trump is an idiot' (and he is), but here in the next article we talk about using AI to cull posts.
'Closing up the internet in some way' would be akin to spotting and censoring a group of people's comments, yes? Effectively limiting their internet use, yes?
Potatoes, Potatos.
wmd on credit psychopaths also cheapskates?... nothing new in centuries? our fault for buying into reruns?
The couple in California did not wake up one day and decide they were going to kill a large number of people. It took place over time.
Citizens of the United States have protection for free speech. That being said you do not have free reign to say what you want in all cases, e.g. Yelling fire in a crowded theater. Can social media companies use sentiment analysis to flag potential lone wolfs and terrorist propaganda? Sure they can. Will they?
When a murderer commits suicide, there is no long drawn-out trial. If this becomes a trend, then it means less jobs for lawyers and judges. By arresting people who might plan to commit murder, we can have trials again.
One one hand that certainly slow down *a bit* recruitment, amount unknown, but that also mean they go underground are are much more difficult to spy on. Much better they stay up, FBI / GIGN /Whoever spy them on, and can catch recruitment attempt or anything suspect.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
My understanding is the pro terrorist content is allowed on the internet so the terrorist can be tracked. The suggestions of Hany Farid represent a policy option that so far has been rejected by our leaders. So why is Hany doing what he is doing? He is doing this to express his loyalty and connection to the US. As a US citizen whose family changed their name in the aftermath of the first World War I offer my sympathy and all the support that I have to give.
How about working on something useful instead of pouring all this time and money into a solution for something that is more rare than getting hit by lightning while riding a dolphin?
No.
No.
Yes.
Yes.
As always, follow the money (or alternatively, he is incredible stupid and actually belives in it).
There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken,
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
In the light of the San Bernardino and Paris attacks - as well as the random lone wolf attacks in Israel, let alone the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Afghanistan, it seems likely that more people are being killed by Islamists than by lightning, let alone whilst riding a dolphin. Which is a sad thought.
However you are correct that terrorism is still a rare phenomenon in the West, and there are better things to spend money on in terms of return
... if you don't mind mis-identifying non-terrorists as terrorists.
It should be so obvious that it goes without saying, but the people who cobbled together things like the anti-terrorist watch lists after 9/11 didn't seem to grasp this: the wider you catch your net, the smaller proportion of what you haul out of the ocean is comprised of fish.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Farid
Match detected. Roll the SWAT team.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not Dartmouth University.
(The article has it right.)
More than a nitpick; it's actually an important Supreme Court decision:
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/initiatives_awards/students_in_action/dartmouth.html
Just like the NSA and Google, technology groups en masse are incompetent and incapable of 99% of the fear mongering crap you hear about in the news.
So, the solution to fighting religious fundamentalist terrorists is not to eliminate the first thing that caused terrorism to happen, which is screwed up Western foreign politics and meddling in other cultures and governments as if it is some strategy game that feeds egos while playacting some kind of world police in the name of ideology, no different than what religious police do, instead of letting the cultures and countries grow up on their own accord without external influence much like a drug addict can't be rehabilitated if it is not on his own accord.
No, the solution is to censor the Internet and make exemptions to freedom of speech irrespective of the flavor and ethics of it so long as they aren't materialized into physical force,
and thus end up doing the exact same thing the fundamentalist religious terrorists have as one of their main motivations. Fear mongering to justify the control of information, the subversion of the principle of societal privacy.
Pure and utter idiocy.
Is anyone on the dark web offering specialized spam bot services to "terror" groups that mask real postings in a sea of spam?
I wonder if the noise level justifies the AI research now.
If it works on them... you may have something there.
s/terrorist groups/Turkish dissidents/ //
s/Turkish
We the American people as a collective, will not tolerate any further infringment on our Constitutional Rights. We obligate all government agencies, employees, contractors, and/or proxies to Support and Defend the Constitution of the United States of America, and obtain a warrant issued by a seated judge, in order to search our data, devices, persons, papers or effects.
They call themselves "The Republican Party". Obama might want to consider hitting their next meeting with a drone strike. I understand its coming up on the 20th.
The best way to cull terrorist groups is to cull the terrorist ... ironically enough, it is also the best way to cull trolls.
Didn't BASIC come from Dartmouth? Haven't they caused enough damage already?
They create sock puppets and use them to drown out dissent. They brought back the opium market in Afghanistan after the Taliban had destroyed it. They destabilize foreign countries (see John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). Paying taxes is adding to evil. I haven't yet decided to fight the IRS though. One approach would be to make checks to that collections agency "payable to the US Treasury", not to that illegitimate organization. And I've been studying other methods of escaping from the corporate matrix.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
As the recent spate of domestic terrorism proves, the policy that mass surveillance exposes terrorists is wrong. Removing "fundamental technology or engineering limitation" is the dream of mass surveillance policies and military contractors: To replace (rare) living HumInt with (mass produced) mechanized SigInt. Understanding intent expands the 'needle in a haystack' flaw of mass surveillance, into all the problems of natural language processing. Computers like Deep Blue, Watson and Wolfram Alpha really handle one subject, which is far short of the Artificial Intelligence required to recognize religious and political rhetoric.
The problem with this is the "base rate." That's what decides your bias as to whether you will have more false positives or false negatives, assuming equal probability of both.
If 1 person in 1,000,000 is a terrorist, and you have a 99.9% accuracy rate (for both false positive and negative), then that means roughly 1 innocent person in 1,000 will be flagged as a terrorist. That's 1,000 people per million...or, in the United States with its current population of 321 million people (as of July 2015, according to the Census Bureau), over 300,000 people. And while you're getting your legs shoved feet-first up your own ass for harassing that many innocent citizens, the 3,210 terrorists you should be chasing are probably slipping out of your grasp because you're so busy going over a third of a million people with a fine-tooth comb looking for evidence of radicalization and threat that you won't be able to find because they're innocent.
So, let's turn the dials...let's say 99.99% accuracy rate. Great...so now you've only gone batshit crazy on 32,000 people. Still epic fail.
99.999% accuracy rate...and it bears noting that I can think of no test that I've ever seen of any form that is even close to this accurate...and you're still bugging 3,200 people.
This is patent bullshit, and it makes me nuts when academics think about playing God with real world this way. I know that research is the driver behind innovation, but the very concept of what he's pushing violates so many "this has been tried before" rules of thumb that I think it's irresponsible of him to approach it without keeping it quiet until he has something somewhat valid to work with.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.