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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 . . .
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.
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:
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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?
He is doing this to express his loyalty and connection to the US.
Doubtful. I've had technical discussions with Mr. Farid before. He was at the top of his game in the graphics field in the 90's (my stupid MBA boss rejected a great offer from him to work on our project - I was mortified). Since then he's become the top expert in validating image authenticity; in doing so he's developed unique and innovative approaches to the problems of extracting signals from noise.
In some ways, the idea of discriminating types of speech is along the same trajectory of the work he's done to date, if one abstracts the information theory from the graphics application. A broad class of work like that will have innumerable applications; I have my doubts about the value of this application, but if that's where the funding is, so much better for the science.
aside: it's cool that he's chairing the department now - when I was taking classes there the people who actually applied the science were looked down upon. The only fun people were the grad students and the rogue profs who advised them. :)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
pre-crime will have a hard time getting past the constitution.
Man I love 'retard'. The most funny and less offensive insult there is. If I had a Down child, I would call him/her when I come home: "where's my little retarded cutie?" :)
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.
In LA
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Point taken.
But if you include the quotes with "charged with plotting" it returns 200,000 results, not 10,500,000
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.