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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.
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.........
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;
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.
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.