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.

Comments

Awesome

[110010001000]

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

Re:Awesome

[Train0987]

He's a trans SJW who often writes about the trials of being a female in IT. To this person ANYONE who doesn't celebrate their flavor of crazy is "far-right" and full of "hate".

Re:Awesome

[110010001000]

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

Re:Awesome

[cayenne8]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Train0987]

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.

Re:Awesome

[sexconker]

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".)

Re:Awesome

[Ichijo]

Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta.
Reg: What!?
Stan: It's my right as a man.
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(Stan starts crying.)

Re:Awesome

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re: Awesome

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Needs a good Xenophobe filter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Should be looking for Che Guevara

[mi]

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.

Re:What about the left?

[Anonymous Coward]

You got it wrong, communists never killed anyone. The ones you are referring too aren't real communists because of some stupid criteria I made up.

Re:Odd

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re:signal to each other in plain sight

[hey!]

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.