Project to “Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online”

From Boing Boing:

The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona has developed a National Science Foundation funded system “to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.”
Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating ‘anonymous’ content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

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  • Rita
    Well if they know whats going on with me on the computer they should worry. LOL
    Rita
  • Well, I suppose it would be possible to write a program that would disguise content, by rewording it in a somewhat random pattern.

    After all, if a program can be written to analyze writing, the nature of the analysis, if known, can be used to disguise other writings.

    I think this will be easier to defeat than most people realize.

    It may, of course, having a chilling effect--just because people know it is out there, they may hesitate...
  • lantz.
    it's been nice knowing you, will. looks like we're all screwed!
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