CIA 'Siren Servers' Can Predict Social Uprisings Several Days Before They Happen (sociable.co) 174
Through a combination of machine learning and deep learning, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using powerful supercomputers, dubbed "Siren Servers" by computer philosophy writer Jaron Lanier, to predict social unrest days before it happens. The Sociable reports: CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its "anticipatory intelligence" through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data. "We have, in some instances, been able to improve our forecast to the point of being able to anticipate the development of social unrest and societal instability some I think as near as three to five days out," said Hallman on Tuesday at the Federal Tech event, Fedstival. The CIA deputy director said that it was "much harder to convey confidence for the policymaker who may make an important decision from advanced analytics with deep learning algorithms." Now that the CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days in advance, there are some interesting theoretical possibilities that can come of this. One is that the CIA's siren servers will become so efficient that they will predict all social uprising and will be able to prevent it. If they are successful in doing that, there would be no need for the CIA as their technology could predict and prevent any societal upheavals, and the agency would be obsolete. Another potential outcome would be that the CIA could use the data and not tell anyone, just like the finance sector did, and then make calculated decisions on whether or not to intervene in any socially distressing situation.
Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
They can't predict shit. Not social unrest, not the weather, and not Pokemon Go.
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Then there's this:
The Global Consciousness Project: Meaningful Correlations in Random Data
"The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures."
http://www.global-mind.org/ [global-mind.org]
Re: Bullshit (Score:3)
Of course they can.
Most of the dissidents in this country are well known and tracked as closely as if they had implanted GPS transmitters.
The same people show up at every protest, get arrested and let go by every city they visit by liberal judges. A phone call from Washington, a hint of a under cover arrangement, and a get out of jail free card.
Dozens if not hundreds of arrests, and they just walk.
Why? The Feds get more information from them running around loose than they would if they were in jail.
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Define dissident? The people protesting gun shootings are not the ones protesting gun control. The people protesting police shooting unarmed blacks are not the ones protesting Clinton.
All they've done here is the classic trick of defining the thing being predicted as so vague, you can always claim success.
"social unrest" is whatever we say it is. And "social unrest = true" is whatever we post-hoc define it to be.
It's really a puff piece in a no-views psych journal claiming some undocumented data mining nons
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Interesting. Do they have true social unrest in Scotland?
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Yeah, how dare they protesting against our dear supreme Leader. They must have some brain disease or so, lets lock them away as dangerous, maybe it's contageous.
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The same people show up at every protest, get arrested and let go by every city they visit by liberal judges. A phone call from Washington, a hint of a under cover arrangement, and a get out of jail free card.
Dozens if not hundreds of arrests, and they just walk.
Why? The Feds get more information from them running around loose than they would if they were in jail.
Liberal judges? Hardly. You know what gets those people out of jail? Two things. First, cost. You know what it costs to arrest hundreds of people and then put them through trial? Thousands of dollars each resulting in millions that was no doubt not budgeted at the beginning of the fiscal year. Second, conservative cops. They're not equipped to arrest hundreds of people, don't have the resources, and simply cannot do it while maintaining policy. So, they don't care about maintaining policy. Who cares if they
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I heard a guy say he hoped the riots would come to his neighborhood because he wanted a new TV. There are plenty of low-life opportunists who are willing to turn a crowd to looting.
This is not something that local police or state national guard would do, because it results in death or injury to themselves and their friends. If, as you claim, the government is responsible for turning protests into riots, it has to be coming from the federal level - and that means Obama and his minions.
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When predicting weather the false positives matter.
When predicting the people standing up against the government it doesn't. You just shut them down hard, regardless of if they are actually trying or not.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, it's easy. Systemic racism, poverty and an unarmed black guy gets murdered by cops, then a few days later there is unrest.
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But what about when an armed black guy gets shot by a black cop in a city with a black police chief? Why is there unrest after that?
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Even I can predict it: cop shoots $random n igger, 2 days later there are riots.
Stupid filter on n*gger, as if I can't find alternate writings like n1gger, nlgger, etc. etc.
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When did Slashdot implement filtering like that? Testing: Nigger.
Filter error: Lameness filter encountered
Wow, fuck you Slashdot.
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The only reason they can predict it, is because they're causing it through acts like paying people to attend protests and start riots, pushing laws that favor small minority groups over the majority, pushing laws that remove power from the people and transfer it to the government, vindictively prosecuting regular people while ignoring crimes by their own, and so on.
They've been pulling this social upheaval crap in foreign countries for decades, now they're doing it here. A public divided won't stand up to t
Re:Shooting innocent unarmed black man (Score:4, Insightful)
By simply 'walking' around the target district and simply 'talking' to people, you'll get a pretty good sense of whether social unrest is going to happen.
Why does everything need to be done by remote control using computers?
For several reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
- Agents sent to the field might be swayed by emotional or logical appeals.
- Remote surveillance means a permanent record and centralized control of both the data and the people using it.
- Social unrest is a threat to a police state and the status quo so "they" are doing everything to quell those things before they become popular enough to affect change.
- To paraphrase Alan Watts, all big institutions exist for themselves and their own continued existence and not the people they purport to serve. Remote everything plays to the military industrial complex's strengths. The machine intends to stay in power.
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do *you* go to every tech website and paste the same shitty comment, thinking yourself so very clever?
(You're not.)
"and prevent any societal upheavals" (Score:3)
Assumes that you can -- in fact -- rapidly prevent societal upheavals with anything but force, which still leaves the root cause unresolved.
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Presumably if social upheavals gather momentum through social media you could dampen, redirect, or prevent them through censorship or propoganda.
Or allowing a conveniently-timed terrorist attack to occur when they had foreknowledge and warnings well ahead of time, and/or causing or allowing someone or some group to cause a major blackout, or inciting a *different* group to violence against the group(s) that stand in the way of more power & control, or simply to keep the first group out of the 24-hr news cycle long enough for them to lose steam. It's already been proven that they've used government agencies like the IRS to illegally harass and ob
Re:"and prevent any societal upheavals" (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow Justin Beiber just does not have the same effect.
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Sounds like our government is starting to fear the citizens and wants to know as early as possible
OR... it's the prudent and reasonable duty of every government to try and foresee any sort of societal trouble (at home and abroad).
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OR... it's the prudent and reasonable duty of every government to try and foresee any sort of societal trouble (at home and abroad).
Ok, but how much (percentage appreciated) do you believe TFS to be true?
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Ok, but how much (percentage appreciated) do you believe TFS to be true?
TFS could be as far from reality as Lefists think that Donald Trump is (I think he's crazy like a fox in knowing how to push the buttons of disaffected voters -- which doesn't mean I support him or think that he's be anything but a disaster), or it could be 100% correct (ROFLMAO).
That still doesn't negate the fact that it's the prudent and reasonable duty of every government to try and foresee any sort of societal trouble (at home and abroad).
I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
If they are successful in doing that, there would be no need for the CIA as their technology could predict and prevent any societal upheavals...
The authors are utterly naive if they think that the CIA's primary role is intelligence gathering, or that they even care overly much about quelling "societal upheavals". The spooks are at least as much about manipulating situations and people, and about spreading disinformation, (not to mention ensuring the Agency's continued existence), as they are about preventing any grief except their own. "Anticipatory Intelligence" is just a tool that allows them to carry on a faster, more efficient, more effective, more lucrative version of 'business as usual'.
I'd be very interested to hear Edward Snowden weigh in on this.
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this means they can predict which cop is going to shoot which guy of whatever ethnic minority or sensitive subculture in exactly what spot so they can drop the swat on em before it happens
the omega point is broken
pardon my sarcasticat for its filled with what you put in it o lords
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See this talk by Former national security advisor, their purpose is to keep the public misinformed and sow distrust so the public can't come together and confront corporate power.
See this talk by national security advisor the upper classes of the world are afraid of the political awakening of the masses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY [youtube.com]
Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ [youtube.com]
"Intended as an internal document. G
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See this talk by Former national security advisor, their purpose is to keep the public misinformed and sow distrust so the public can't come together and confront corporate power.
What is up with this obsession over "corporate power"? Government is the power in "corporate power". A large corporate can monetize government power far better than a poor person can.
I think all the ranting about evil corporations is blame deflection from the true culprits.
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As I implied in my previous reply, a common goal of government players is to monetize their power. Working out profitable deals with big businesses in a time of war is a convenient opportunity to do so. It's foolish however to assume t
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Guess who they ran those schemes FOR? Corporations.
Because corporations unlike you have something to offer in return.
Do you have anything relevant to say? In the "War is a Racket" example, there was one government and hundreds of businesses. It is foolish to claim that the businesses were the power, when the government had the money in the first place and the power.
So politicians SELL power.
Yes, that's my point. A small group sells power to a large market. Classic cartel market in favor of the politicians.
Only 0.5% compared to what? How many politicians and their lackeys can claim to have earn a fraction of that out of the war?
We can't know, can we? But General Butler was of the opinion that profit wa
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AFAIK the part the CIA has been blurring the boundaries of is the distinction between foreign and domestic, not so much foreign action/foreign intelligence gathering.
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Still, the idea that predicting upheavals is so much of what they do that this would make the agency obsolete is nonsense.
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And how's the weather in Langley today?
What if... (Score:3, Insightful)
What if the 'social upheaval' is justified? What if it is technically allowed by the 1st amendment? What if they tell the president that riots are due to start in xyz town and move in the National Guard, even though those riots are due to true injustice that needs to be addressed?
Can the government stop speech before it happens? What does that leave for the already shattered remnants of democracy?
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Check your historical record. Rebellions have been crushed violently. Speech is persuasion not coercion, and at the time the first amendment was written, speech meant publishing pamphlets to promote your cause. Today speech means blogging. Get thee to Twitter.
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Re:What if... (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean if? Go back and watch "Selma" and you'll see that even in the 1960s they were looking to identify the movers and shakers and where they were going to stir up trouble with wiretaps. This is the same on steroids, same way stock robots try to analyze if people generally talk positive or negative about a stock without really understanding the news. If it's building up to a frenzy and a riot, there will have to be a lot of buzz in social media up front. Without knowing what they exactly are, I'm sure that with big data you'll find the words or phrases that indicate it's really going down and not just a bunch of keyboard warriors talking big. And the level of coordination required means you'll have the where and when repeated many times to many different people.
What you choose to do about it really depends on who you are, what you want and what you're capable of. Maybe you just want to keep the situation under control, maybe you want it to get out of control so you can justify coming in to crush it, maybe you want to arrest a few leaders and scare people from showing up in the first place. The last one would actually be the creepiest, crushing riots is public and messy. Snuffing them out before they even start is silent but deadly. If you're a foreign intelligence agency though, would you like to warn about it to allies? Incite riots in unfriendly states? Who knows. On the other hand, the speed information spreads might also lead to bigger and faster flash mobs than before so I'm not sure if it's really easier or harder to get the word out.
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What if the 'social upheaval' is justified? What if it is technically allowed by the 1st amendment? What if they tell the president that riots are due to start in xyz town and move in the National Guard, even though those riots are due to true injustice that needs to be addressed?
I've got two words for you to google: WTO PROTEST. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know to drop the "What if", then nothing will — but compare and contrast the French response to a protest. French SWAT cops wear masks so that they cannot be identified later, and this is the country that's banned the burkini... but they'll tolerate mass protests in the streets any day of the week.
Freedom is incredibly unevenly distributed. The only rhyme or reason to it is that some groups are easy to t
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Please ignore this comment. I mistakenly down modded the above comment and cannot undo it so posting to lose my previous mods.
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Too late, I read it.
Social engineering (Score:3)
Re: Social engineering (Score:5, Informative)
Psychohistory. Long live Hari Seldon.
Yeah, until the Mule comes along and throws a spanner into the works.
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Actually, Asimov first wrote of it (and quite possibly did a better job of exploring it) here [wikipedia.org].
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Not again... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Have to say: I hate this fucking meme. 1984 wasn't a user manual, 1984 was a Roman a Clef about what was already going on at that time and which the author knew would continue.
And since it pretty much came true, one can easily argue that some governments used it as a user manual.
Go figure what happens when you pick up a book and follow the directions.
Or perhaps follow it as if it were instructions. I would say, though, that 1984 is just a minor footnote compared to the way world leaders have embraced Machiavelli's Prince, which as I understand it was also not intended to be a manual. And there is even some indication that Atlas Shrugged was meant as a biting commentary on a growing social order in which those who created nothing and knew only how to destroy were judged fit to rule over those who made the world work — not just owners of companies,
how is this beneficial? (Score:4, Insightful)
honest question: how does this help general society? the way i see it, if people are so pissed off all the time that you can't tell if you are about to fubar things then you have no business being in any position of authority.
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With a few days warning any form of US friendly gov can be fully protected from its own people.
Efforts by the working class or patriotic right can be discovered, tacked and removed before any international media finds out about domestic calls for change. No calls for democracy gain traction, no international media, no counter coup.
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Benghazi (Score:2)
When things get to the point of an upheaval your aren't going to stop it. But you can evacuate people, circle the wagons, etc.
There were plenty of warning that things were about to blow up in Libya a few years ago, but the ambassador in Benghazi was still caught in the middle and murdered. That could have been prevented.
Since the 1960's? (Score:1)
Tap all the political leaders, mil, gov, industrial leaders, media, banking elite, celebrities and one productive hop beyond them.
As reports of industrial action, protests, riots, cost of living spread fast amount the left or right political base so a few days warning in most nations would have been possible given actual local events.
Most nations do have
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Apart from a drop in gun sales, nah. Good riddance.
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Meaningless without false positive rate. (Score:1)
I have an earthquake detector that works 100% of the time. Unfortunately, it's terrible at detecting days when there won't be an earthquake. Publish the quantitative data or STFU.
Sounds like somebody went data dredging and hasn't bothered to validate its predictive utility. My bet is the false alarm rate makes it equally useless to the DHS color-coded threat alert system.
Don't act on the info! (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be totally god-like if they could predict uprisings but chose to do nothing to prevent them.
Re:Don't act on the info! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wouldn't it be totally god-like if they could predict uprisings but chose to do nothing to prevent them.
No. It would be totally aristocratic. Those Who Rule have been doing this shit since forever. The reason? They're not actually that smart. They're not actually capable of doing the best job of leading, and they don't see coming a mile away what ought to be obvious. This is not a problem for them, because they are not interested in leading.
Same song and dance (Score:1)
I smell vendor hype.
Ha Ha Ha (Score:2)
If a prediction prevents an event, the model of prediction fails and can no longer predict if it is self-learning.
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Exactly! The whole thing is based on tracking civil unrest. Its entirely focused on predicting bad things. Wouldn't acting on these predictions and then feeding that information back into the machine then continuing to act on the predictions blindly basically cause a feedback loop where the AI slowly goes mad as it directs its caretakers to stage the systematic disassembly of society?
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dude, put the bong away. The machine learning thingy they use, does not take predictions as input. It takes illegally intercepted data as input, and produces a prediction. Its more like simulating a hurricane, or something. It analyzes a metric assload of data, and produces some metrics, which can be used to visualize the situation somehow and comparing the new picture to the old picture, one can see changes in trends in system... There's probably a third algo, that actually alerts humans to changes that th
NOV 8 will be flagged and marshal law may need to (Score:2)
NOV 8 will be flagged and marshal law may need to used to shut down the vote if they feel that Hillery will lose.
Statistical explanation (Score:2)
After analysis of the AI system it was found that the impressive predictive results were to a large extent explained by the input parameter: Police officer shoots unarmed man and the police tries to cover it up with lies.
Bert
What BS (Score:3)
Most "social uprisings" result from unforeseeable impulsive events (like a shooting). How are you going to predict those?
Maybe, just maybe, you could give a weather report like "chance of uprising is X%," but I would want to see some verification of these probabilities (are they better, for example, that just saying that riots are more probable in hot, humid weather than immediately after a snowstorm?).
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CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup (20 August 2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
The chance of uprising starting is then 100%.
True, False? (Score:1)
make calculated decisions on whether or not to intervene in any socially distressing situation.
As long as it fit within the budget,
The CIA cannot use the knowledge too much (Score:2)
It is a bit like the output from the Enigma machine, if you used the knowledge too much, the Germans would have worked out that they were being 'Hacked' and then start doing something else that could not be 'hacked' in the same way.
however, you can be better placed to pick up the pieces.
US citizens may be able to correct me, but I thought that the CIA was only allowed to snoop outside the US
Sure (Score:2)
"We can predict the future" ...says the agency founded with the sole purpose of watching the Soviet Union, who watched it for nearly five decades, yet managed to entirely miss its collapse.
Sure.
Strange but true (Score:2)
Jaron Lanier invented hipsters.
This is the last straw! (Score:2)
We've got to march on Langely Virginia right now!
Always had this, part of the matrix (Score:1)
Used to use people. Really smart guys that could predict this. They'd yank out people before things went to hell. Cuba, Iran are famous examples. Goes back about 100 years. They probably had ways even back then. Old police style work. The US used to send in people to fix things. Some people didn't like that. Guys like Castro, who is a monster. Look it up sometime, see what he used to do to people.
This is just part of the matrix. The real matrix. They're coming to get you aha, oho, ahee, ahoo.
https://www.you [youtube.com]
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Next time remember to log in, Donald. Then you'll get modded up for this for sure.
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The idea is to stop what happened in France with networking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"... in 1986, French university students coordinated a national strike using Minitel, demonstrating an early use of digital communication devices for participatory technopolitical ends."
Re 'It's difficult to stop mobs although the police can arrive in force before the mob swells in size and commitment."
The US view is to find and stop the charismatic or photogeni
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Don't you mean "RMN [wikipedia.org]"?
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I doubt [greatdreams.com] that very much.
Remote Neural Monitoring
Remote Neural Monitoring is a form of functional neuroimaging, claimed[1] to have been developed by the National Security Agency(NSA), that is capable of extracting EEG data from the human brain at a distance with no contacts or electrodes required. It is further claimed that the NSA has the capablility to decode this data to extract subvocalizations, visual and auditory data.
We're gonna need better tin-foil hats people.