EU Funding "Orwellian" Artificial Intelligence Snooping System

leonbenjamin writes "Britain's Telegraph reports on a five-year research programme, called Project Indect, which aims to develop computer programmes which act as 'agents' to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' Shami Chakrabarti, head of the UK's Liberty human-rights NGO, said: 'Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. ... It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.'"

Haven't we been here before?

[fataugie]

CARNIVORE anyone?

Re:Haven't we been here before?

[jgtg32a]

CARNIVORE turned out to be a bit underwhelming once details of what it actually was came out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Haven't we been here before?

[megamerican]

Total Information Awareness [wikipedia.org]

Excerpt

[Eddy Luten]

For those who do not feel comfortable going to the Project INDECT site [indect-project.eu] here's an excerpt:

Project Description

Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment.

The main objectives of the INDECT project are:

• to develop a platform for: the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence,
• to develop the prototype of an integrated, network-centric system supporting the operational activities of police officers, providing techniques and tools for observation of various mobile objects,
• to develop a new type of search engine combining direct search of images and video based on watermarked contents, and the storage of metadata in the form of digital watermarks,

The main expected results of the INDECT project are:

• to realise a trial installation of the monitoring and surveillance system in various points of city agglomeration and demonstration of the prototype of the system with 15 node stations,
• implementation of a distributed computer system that is capable of acquisition, storage and effective sharing on demand of the data as well as intelligent processing, construction of a family of prototypes of devices used for mobile object tracking,
• construction of a search engine for fast detection of persons and documents based on watermarking technology and utilising comprehensive research on watermarking technology used for semantic search,
• construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, UseNet groups, file servers, p2p networks as well as individual computer systems,
• elaboration of Internet based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive, and demonstrating its efficiency in a measurable way.

Sinister indeed.