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Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI To Find Hate and Far-Right Symbols on Twitter and Facebook (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the one-man-army dept.

Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has interviewed Emily Crose, a former NSA hacker, who has built NEMESIS, an AI-powered program that can help spot symbols that have been co-opted by hate groups to signal to each other in plain sight. Crose, who has also moderated Reddit in the past, thought of building NEMESIS after the Charlottesville, Virginia incident last year. From the report: Crose's motivation is to expose white nationalists who use more or less obscure, mundane, or abstract symbols -- or so-called dog whistles -- in their posts, such as the Black Sun and certain Pepe the frog memes. Crose's goal is not only to expose people who use these symbols online but hopefully also push the social media companies to clamp down on hateful rhetoric online. "The real goal is to educate people," Crose told me in a phone call. "And a secondary goal: I'd really like to get the social media platforms to start thinking how they can enforce some decency on their own platforms, a certain level of decorum." [...]

At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There's an "inference graph," which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos. In a way, NEMESIS is dumb, according to Crose, because there are still humans involved, at least at the beginning. NEMESIS needs a human to curate the pictures of the symbols in the inference graph and make sure they are being used in a white supremacist context. For Crose, that's the key to the whole project -- she absolutely does not want NEMESIS to flag users who post Hindu swastikas, for example -- so NEMESIS needs to understand the context. "It takes thousands and thousands of images to get it to work just right," she said.

32 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nothing can possibly go wrong with this. It has everything: NSA, hacking, white supremacists, reddit, AI. Definitely worth funding.

    1. Re:Awesome by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But...Nazis. You don't like Nazis do you? If you are against this, you must be a Nazi. Look everyone, a Nazi!

    2. Re:Awesome by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Hmm....why aren't they building this for extremists on BOTH sides of the aisle?

      There's plenty of hate and violence on the left these days to match those on the far, far right.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    3. Re:Awesome by Train0987 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It takes a special kind of guy to cut his penis off and then complain about being treated differently "as a female in IT".

      And then to go on a crusade against "far-right" symbols? There is no greater "far-left" symbol than cutting off your own junk and then demanding everyone else pretend you're a woman.

      This is what feminism is now? Men are even better at being female hackers? Well done feminism.

    4. Re: Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because real women don't need feminism.

    5. Re:Awesome by sexconker · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Didn't you see the Slashdot posts from the past couple of days? Cold weather and all individual weather events are now officially evidence for global warming.

    6. Re: Awesome by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People who get triggered when their birth sex is mentioned, are on a personal crusade to silence 'the far right' and have access to all your data. What could possibly go wrong...

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      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    7. Re:Awesome by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Let me know when people begin growing and maturing again rather than lashing out at society for your problems (every rights movement save ending segregation).

      Feminism was originally a just movement, true to its stated goals.

      ("Feminism" today is a sick, twisted perversion of the original. It's so bad they retroactively redefined feminism. Now if you want to talk about the feminism that cares about equality, respects men and women the same, etc. you have to talk about "first wave feminism".)

    8. Re:Awesome by sexconker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of all the recent politically-motivated protests, the left has been far more prone to violence. Then there's also the property destruction, looting, etc.

    9. Re:Awesome by rogoshen1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      i'm sure it would go something like this...

      "cold weather is intersectionally related to white supremacy and thus the patriarchy because cold weather is typically found in northern climes, where the white people are originally from. Therefore, cold weather = white people = racism = patriarchy"

    10. Re:Awesome by GameboyRMH · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Would you also think it's wrong for a baker to be forced to make a cake for an interracial wedding if he didn't wish to? Just for the record, lady. You don't mind me calling you a lady, do you? It's my right.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    11. Re:Awesome by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Jim Crow and segregation is a special case. But not that much of one. E.g. look at the Woolworths case

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      On February 1, 1960, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond, four young African-American students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), entered the downtown Greensboro Woolworth's and sat at the "whites only" lunch counter. Although a Woolworth's waitress told them "we don't serve Negroes here," the four students refused to leave their seats for the rest of the day. During the following days and months the four students were joined by other students in their sit-in demonstration, Sit-in protests spread to over one hundred cities across the United States during the next year, and are considered the onset of the Civil Rights Movement.

      On Monday, July 25, 1960, after nearly $200,000 in losses due to the demonstrations, store manager Harris quietly integrated the lunch counter when he asked 3 black employees of the store to change out of work clothes into street clothes and order a meal at the counter. These were the first black customers to be served at the store's lunch counter. The event received little publicity

      I.e. given a free market, companies that discriminate will go out of business and companies that don't discriminate will prosper. You don't need the government to intervene. In fact the government did intervene and on the wrong side - there were laws enforcing segregation. Get rid of those and let the market sort things out.

      And gay people wanting wedding cakes is not the same thing as Jim Crow and segregation in the 60's. It's not like any of the wedding cake cases meant that the complainers couldn't get a wedding cake somewhere else. For example

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      Craig and Mullins visited Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver to order a custom wedding cake for their return celebration. Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is Christian, declined, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for same-sex marriages due to his religious beliefs although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins left the store without discussing details of the cake design. The following day, Craig's mother called Phillips, who told her that he does not make wedding cakes for same-sex weddings. While another bakery provided a cake to the couple, Craig and Mullins filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the state's public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Colorado is one of twenty-one U.S. states that have anti-discrimination laws against sexual orientation. Craig and Mullins' complaint resulted in a lawsuit, Craig v. Masterpiece Cakeshop. The case was decided in favor of the plaintiffs; the cake shop was ordered not only to provide cakes to same-sex marriages, but to "change its company policies, provide 'comprehensive staff training' regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers."

      Craig and Mullins actually got their cake from another bakery - and Masterpiece Cakeshop didn't refuse to sell them a cake, it refused to make them a custom one. I.e. this is not the same as Jim Crow. This is about Craig and Mullins wanting to bully someone they disagreed with politically and threaten them with bankruptcy unless they made a "I support gay wedding" cake and agreed to go on 'comprehensive staff training', aka have some SJW type tell them all they were scum.

      Fuck 'em.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    12. Re: Awesome by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also if you call a biker a woman and get beaten up the biker is breaking the law. Misgendering laws like this mean you'd be breaking the law

      https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/...

      New York City issued guidelines in December 2015 for employers and landlords on the correct pronoun usage for transgender men and transgender women. Violating the guidelines intentionally or repeatedly could result in a fine as large as $250,000, especially if doing so appears to be malicious. The guidelines say that to avoid the fine, transgender people must be asked what their preferred pronoun is.

      The guidelines require anyone who provides jobs or housing to use the transgender person's preferred pronoun, such as "ze," "hir," "they," them," "he," "she," "him," or "her." "Ze" is the third person singular, used in place of either "he" or "she," while "hir" is third person possessive, used to replace "his" or "her." Pronouns like "ze" or "hir" represent a break from traditional male- or female-only roles.

      "Gender expression may not be distinctively male or female and may not conform to traditional gender-based stereotypes to specific gender identities," said a city official.

      While some say that the conversation over transgender pronouns represents progress toward equality, others note how easy it might be - even for the parents of transgender people - to also sometimes forget or mix up the pronouns.

      The guidelines are the country's first of their kind, coming from the New York City Commission on Human Rights. About 75,000 transgender people live in New York City.

      "I think it comes down to respect. People identify how they want to identify and it's not up to anyone else to determine that," a pedestrian told Fox 5. "There are a lot of social norms that are changing and people need to understand that this is someone's life, it's not just a flippant choice."

      Others however think the fine is too high. "I understand the intent," another pedestrian told Fox, "but $250,000 is excessive." Writer Paul Joseph Watson at InfoWar said the notion of businesses asking every customer what pronoun they want to use is "absurd," given that even Facebook delineates 71 gender options.

      "So people can basically force us - on pain of massive legal liability - to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it's a lie," writes Eugene Volokh, law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

      It's also pretty obvious that laws like this violate the First Amendment as Volokh points out. Be able to threaten people with $250,000 fines unless they call you "ze" is fucking mental.

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    13. Re:Awesome by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My parents were married as an interracial couple in the 1940s, they had to rent their apartment through a straw buyer. Now it's all well and good to say, "you have the civil right to marry anyone you want," but it's not very meaningful if that means giving up on a roof over your head.

      Now wedding cakes are a cause celebre specifically because it's a trivial issue. But confronting this level of triviality is an intrinsic consequence of line-drawing. Either you draw no lines, in which case you as a person whose personal life choices may be unpopular are in possession of legal rights are effectively meaningless. Or you draw the line somewhere, in which case somebody is giving up something.

      I'd argue that the fact that what is given up either way on this question is trivial, it's somewhere in the general vicinity of "right" when it comes to line drawing.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    14. Re:Awesome by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wedding cakes aren't a trivial issue. And of the opinions I've read on this, this seems to sum it up best

      https://www.desmoinesregister....

      It was nice to read the essay by the gay couple who got married in Iowa without any discrimination issues to deal with [Glad to live in Iowa, free from discrimination, Dec. 29]. It is fair and reasonable for the government to prohibit discrimination against gay couples and others in the selling of standard goods and services that are offered to the public like most products retail stores, rooms at hotels and meals at restaurants. But when the product or service needs to be customized or personalized by the seller, then discrimination by the seller should be allowed and the buyer should not be able to enlist the force of government to require the seller to provide the product or service.

      So, for example, cake bakers should be required to sell what is what is on their shelves and available for sale without discrimination, but they should not be required to create custom cakes against their will. At the same time, buyers are free to choose other sellers and to organize peaceful protests and boycotts against such discriminating sellers. This way everyone's liberty is preserved and no force needs to be used by government or anyone else.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    15. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Even attempting to equate hate on the left with the hate and violence on the right is detached from reality. Why trolls like you get any upvotes ... It's vile.

      Sure. It's all those campus Republicans that shout down speakers they disagree with, and violently attacked the Secretary of Education.

      Dude, what color is the sky on your planet?

    16. Re: Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They refused to design a cake, not bake one. They offered to sell them everything, including the decorations, and they could have decorated it themselves. Are you saying an artist must put their talents into something they disagree with?

      Would you support the same decision if it was a Nazi demanding that a Jewish bakery bake a cake with a swastika on it? And forget the whole bullshit "protected class" angle, because that's another problem in itself.

      This is my issue with the Left. They always have this need to force their views on other people, and they never do it themselves. They cowardly go crying to some other authority. Looking back, you could tell who these people were on the elementary school playground. Always crying to some teacher because someone else wouldn't do what they wanted them to do. It's a mental disorder, and need to be classified as such.

  2. And the far left by mschuyler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the far left gets a pass!

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    How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
    1. Re:And the far left by Noishkel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of course. After all far left academia have been rewriting the definitions of everything for years now. Be it the idea of what is racism to the very concept of gender. All while the news media covers for them by writing puff piece after puff piece proclaiming the virtues of these bat-shit and abjectly false notions.

  3. What about the left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What about far-left wing symbols of hate, violence, and oppression?

    Antifa flags, socialist fist, hammer & sickle

    After all, the Communists have killed far more innocents than the Nazis did.

  4. Needs a good Xenophobe filter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It definitely needs to find a way to filter out ANYTHING that might be Xenophobic because that's always racist.

    Unless it's about Russia.

    Or unless it's about Boycott, Divest & Sanction which is the politically correct way to literally act like 1933-era Hitler but OK on the UC Berkeley campus so not a hate group.

    Or unless it's misgynistic AND xenophobic remarks about Melania Trump because reasons.

    Or unless it's antisemitism directed at Ivanka Trump because similar reasons.

  5. Should be looking for Che Guevara by mi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Communism is both much deadlier and more socially-accepted than any other kind of hateful school of thought today.

    Anything "fighting evil" that ignores images of Che Guevara and like symbols is simply partisan b.s.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  6. Re:signal to each other in plain sight by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's even better than that. Not only are they not drying to hide, they pop up whereever some offended snowflake deems them appropriate. Can't win an argument on merits? Call the other guy a Nazi and you're golden! I'll demonstrate:

    1. American immigration laws should be enforced.
    2. There is no evidence that police in America apply different standards to white citizens and non-white citizens.
    3. Islamic fundamentalism motivates the violent act committed by many extremists and must be combated and defended against using within the framework of foreign diplomacy, foreign aid, military policy, and immigration policy.
    4. Government benefits should only be provided to the demonstrably infirm or aged citizens and not be made available to able-bodied persons of working age.
    5. Restrictions on the sale, ownership, or possession of firearms punish the law-abiding and do not make any dent in violent crime.

    All of those are either factually true or present an opinion within the mainstream of acceptible American thought. How long will it take for someone to label one or all of them extreme and me an extremist beyond the pale of acceptable civil discourse.

  7. Re:Only white supremacists, right? by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seems like a good way to fight racism.

    I know..go figure, right?

    I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.

    Seriously?

    Geez....common sense has gone 101% out the door in the US.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  8. Re:Only white supremacists, right? by hey! · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.

    Well, dredging strawmen from the bottom of the YouTube comment barrel is hardly epistemologically impressive.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  9. "I disapprove of what you say, but..." by imperious_rex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The famous statement "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (incorrectly attributed to Voltaire) has always been the best summary of the principle and right of free speech. Given the sad state of civics education in the past three decades, we're seeing the result of this failure to learn this basic idea. When we put "feels" above principle, we get garbage like NEMESIS that ignores the far left crackpots and singles out the far right crackpots. People really need to listen to their elders' take on free speech and democracy and not be a sucker.

  10. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  11. Re:signal to each other in plain sight by GameboyRMH · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Ugh, here we go.

    https://www.vox.com/cards/poli...

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

    I hope these facts will persuade you to stop spewing lies.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  12. Re:signal to each other in plain sight by Train0987 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First of all I didn't use "trans" as a pejorative. I did use "crazy" as one though.

    Since you call me a bigot/racist, exactly which race do you imagine me to be? That I've put you on the spot with that question should indicate that you're already wrong and that you've been caught. The only dog-whistles here are those in your own head that you've been conditioned by others to hear. In other words, you are the bigot - not me.

  13. Re:signal to each other in plain sight by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ugh indeed.
    1. Vox and Mother Jones (which one of your links cites) are partisan publications, not neutral reporters of fact.

    That aside,

    2. Disproportionate police use of force with and arrests of members of different population groups do not imply different enforcement standards unless there is parity in overall rates of crime among those groups. Black Americans commit more crimes per capita and live in higher-crime neighborhoods on average. Thus more encounters with police. And often for good reason. Your purported source of neutral facts tacitly assumes things like that don't matter and you tacitly assume that disparate outcomes implies disparate treatment. It doesn't. White people who charge at cops also tend to catch a bullet for their troubles.

    3. Sloppy wording and lose definitions make for the best scatter plots, don't they? "Gun-related" deaths includes suicides. Whether you chose to count it in the same statistic as homicide by firearm is nothing other than that: a choice. Count it to pad the numbers one way. Exclude it to pad the numbers the other way. Half of "gun-related" deaths are suicides in the US and while I don't have numbers for the other countries on the plot, let's say the slope of that line drops by half.

    The per-state chart is another cart-before-the-horse abuse of statistics. My statement was about gun restrictions. The chart is about gun ownership. The two are not the same, and while the correlation is weak to start with, the argument for causation is not there. Minnesota, Vermont, Maine, Iowa, Utah and Oregon have large populations and high gun ownership but lower gun deaths per capita than Colorado, Nevada, Maryland, and Florida which also have high populations but lower gun ownership. Then there's Chicago and Maryland and Camden NJ in particular which has strict local and state laws and insane homicide rates.

  14. Re:signal to each other in plain sight by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually there is abundant data confirming that minorities get different treatment by police than whites. For example epidemiological research says whites are slightly more likely to use weed than blacks, but law enforcement statistics show that blacks are roughly 3x more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

    It is also true that police actually shoot roughly twice as many white people per year as blacks, but there are five times as many whites as blacks. This doesn't mean that every time a cop shoots a black man that race is a factor, but statistically it is bound to be a factor in a large number of shootings, although not in the simplistic way favored by many left-wing blogs on the topic -- although that probably happens at least some of the time. Assuming that the police are no better or no worse than society at large they must have enough racist sociopaths to produce at least a few shootings like that per year.

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    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  15. Re:No, it's a blatant re-branding. by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Many people claiming to want equality actually don't want equality at all, they want inequality which favors them.

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!