NSF-Funded "Dark Web" to Battle Terrorists 258
BuzzSkyline writes "The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on 'advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyze extremist activities online.' The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
The quote you're looking for (Score:3, Interesting)
Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes
- Juvenal
Re:5% (Score:3, Interesting)
So when they get it wrong, and the police storm my front door instead of my neighbors, will it still be "cool"?
It's actually pretty obvious, and the only thing that surprises me is that it's being developed now. My only guess that makes sense, here, is that this is a replacement for older tech they're already using.
"NSF-Funded" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:F or A? (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean kind of like how there are now lots more skilled laser eye surgeons in the private sector competing to give you better prices for your business because once the military decided to back providing that service to its pilots, there was a giant leap in people being trained to do the work during their rotations?
As far as cancer: the military provides all kinds of basic medical research from which we all benefit. You'll see considerable military spending in epidemialogical studies, trauma treatment, etc. To the extent that, say, The Marine Corp is a weapon, the huge studies that can be conducted on the systematically collected health stats, DNA, etc., on a huge number of generally healthy people over several generations IS a part of all sorts of cancer (and other) studies.
Re:5% (Score:1, Interesting)
Why can you do this? Because your constitutional rights are violated. And the only way to effectively defend them is if everyone else is on your side. And the only way to ensure that is to make them the enemy of they are not.
Get it?
State violates your constitutional rights? You have the right to kill any of it's citizens that do not take your side against the state in response.
The "rub" here, of course, is that an independent court (remember when the branches of government were truely independent and this included the judiciary?) is the only legitimate determiner of whether you acted legally or illegally, so you better make sure before you start your private war.
But, ultimately, only the people can uphold the constitution, and sometimes they might have to do so unwillingly to save their own skins: "Kill that cop or I kill you... NOW!" does not strike me as an unreasonable way of effecting this.
Yes, this is an apalling scenario. But, governments use force all the time to butress questionable "law", and use questionable "law" to legitimize force. So, why does not the individual (a) make a point of responding in kind, (b) associate with other like minded folk? (Remember that bit about freedom of association?)
"Spying" (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not even that difficult. (Score:4, Interesting)
So all that the government would need would be the addresses of the web sites (no matter where they are located) and taps on the pipelines. You can either try to catch the stuff going OUT of your country or going INTO their country (if you can't just tap the line of that website).
That will tell you who, in your country, is going there.
As long as it isn't using encryption, you'll even get what is being read/posted.
If it is using encryption, you still should have the location of the guy reading/posting. Or you can try cracking the encryption.
Once you have the location of the guy, you get a warrant and put a keylogger on his box or whatever.
There's no need for all of this crap about "darkweb". Google can already tell you what is posted on what websites. If these guys are smart enough to beat the basics, they're smart enough to know NOT to use the Internet for point-to-point communications.
RTFA People (Score:2, Interesting)
The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source. Let's not forget computers don't give a rats ass who they work for, so the door swings both ways on this one. It can be used to catch dissenters (bad for freedom), terrorists (good for safety), and government/media misinformation agents (good for freedom).
Computationally expensive beyond practicality (Score:5, Interesting)
You can only extrapolate data you've read properly. The simplest of encryption and/or obfuscation schemes applied to this content would effectively protect against extrapolation. Sure, Big Brother can have software scrub the Net looking for suspicious content. But can they have software scrub the Net while applying decryption measures to everything found? While analyzing every image file for obfuscated content (or even something as simple as writing your terrorist plans on a piece of paper and scanning it in as an image)? While applying rot13 to every block of text found?
I would say no. The problem becomes computationally impossible at that point. There are theoretically infinite ways to hide, encrypt, or obfuscate data. To have a system check first for unhidden, unencrypted, un-obfuscated data, then also for each of those, is simply not doable unless one makes radical limitations to the format of the data itself.
I would say instead that this "Dark Web" will be invaluable in identifying characteristics of perfectly law-abiding forum posters, slashdotters, and so forth, and that the data gleaned will fetch a good price from directed marketeers, pharmaceutical companies, spammers, government bureaucracies, and other servants of the Dark Lord.
About 20% of "colonists" opposed our Independence. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had polled England at the time, and those Loyalists, you'd understand that the "terrorists" had control of the "colonies".
If England had won, every one of those "terrorists" who had signed their little "Declaration" would have been hanged. And their would have been rejoicing in the streets of the colonies.
Web Pages? (Score:2, Interesting)
expend resources making a web page that spiders can crawl.
Here's a hint:
Terrorist #1 sets up a WIFI home network with
limited external access and **no connection** to the
internet.
Non of the terrorists really want to know each other
since that would make them easier to find if one got caught.
All the other terrorists require is a GPS location relatively
close to the hot-spot. Not even the street address.
They park, or slow down,the car at the GPS coordinates, get some instructions
via WIFI ssh, and drive on.
How's a web spider going to find that?
The authorities would be better off looking for *extra powerful*
WIFI hot-spots.
Here's another hint:
Facsimile over dual channel FRS radio. Same as above
except the interchange is FAX.
Go get em boys!!!
The super awesome do-it-all tool been waiting for (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, their job should be simple! (Score:4, Interesting)
They just need to pull up their own employee roster to see who's largely responsible for world terrorism.
Of course, the young recruits are probably still too busy puffing their chests smartly while humming the "Alias" theme music while quietly wishing that the NSA was the one which received the big Hollywood PR/propaganda effort to notice such sticky details as who was responsible for what. But what are a few sticky details? M's and W's all look the same.
-FL
Re:5% +++++ (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.visualanalytics.com/ [visualanalytics.com]
Hell, just see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=visual+analytics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
The thing is, I wonder if that NY Times (I think it was NYT) reporter/columnist under bushwhack/assault for "divulging" sensitive collection techniques to the "ter'rists" knew of Visual Analytics and could have shielded himself from uncouth assault.
I am SURE that universities and various stealthy government entities have comparable capabilities or enhanced code, and some probably even work WITH Visual Analytics. It's a POWERFUL and kinda neat tool. So long as it's not abused.
Re:"terrorist" vs. "freedom fighter" (Score:3, Interesting)
The US wasn't attacked by terrorists. They were attacked by a tight knit military group that went after their critical infrastructure. The world trade center, the center of their economy. The pentagon, center of their military. And the commander in chief.
There have been no grocery stores blown up, no shopping malls, no attacks with Nuclear, Chemical or Biological agents, not even drive by shootings.
So basically, any time you hear the word "Terrorist" used to describe attacks on the US, you're listening to spin and lies, because it's never happened.