Augusta Free Press:Virginia Tech wins contract from Army Research Office to develop tool to link individuals, events
A researcher at Virginia Tech has won a subcontract from the United States Army Research Office and United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center to develop an automated tool to make sense of data captured in news articles, tweets, images, and audio and video streams.
The software, intended to help help law enforcement agencies connect suspects and events, will allow the intelligence community to rapidly generate “linkages” by extracting information about location, identity, organization, and relationship, which will help them to tie individuals and groups to events and activities.
The researcher, associate professor Chang-Tien Lu, said. “By developing efficient spatiotemporal storytelling techniques we will discover meaningful relationships among entities and deliver rapid and accurate insights.”
Presumably Cyberdyne's involvement is pending hardware "development".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:06PM
Person of Interest
(Score: 2) by dlb on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:12PM
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday December 29 2014, @05:37PM
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by Cornwallis on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:07PM
The researcher, associate professor Chang-Tien Lu, said. “By developing efficient spatiotemporal storytelling techniques we will discover meaningful relationships among entities and deliver rapid and accurate insights so we can kill them faster.”
FTFY
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:17PM
Skynet was a military computer system that was meant to consolidate control over military hardware and software.
That's not this.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:11PM
Correct, this is the ARIIA (Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst) evil machine that will kill us all.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:19PM
Yeah, that will work.
Already people are snapping up encryption capable apps for messaging and photos, and this will push that faster.
Seems like if they aren't doing it already, its prolly too late to start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:26PM
That encryption only protects the information in transit...sometimes...and usually uses SSL which is very MTM'able by GO's.
The databases holding this info are still very much open to government perusal at any time and you can bet this software will have limitless access.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by TestablePredictions on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:31PM
Perhaps those spatiotemporal storytelling techniques won't lead to accurate insights at all. What if they lead to tall tales instead? Such as whichever tall tale is most convenient for the US Army at the time.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday December 24 2014, @11:21AM
A thousand times this. This will be used to reverse-engineer a superficially plausible evidence chain to support whatever conclusion its masters feed into it. This is how much of law enforcement and most "intelligence" work is already done today, this will just do it a lot more quickly, efficiently, and will produce far more voluminously-documented (albeit no less absurdly insubstantial) results.
- Hey Skynet, there's a whistleblower / political activist / guy i just don't like much that I want to discredit, torture and then lock up for about a million years. What can you dig up on him?
- Finished!
- OK, give me a summary of the juiciest details.
- Alright, here we go. I have processed a hundred million phone calls, a billion facebook updates, 10 billion tweets, 25 years' of bank statements, credit card transactions and more. I can tell you that the target's wife once bought cheese from a man who shook hands with Saddam Hussein's nephew in 1982. She is also in semi-regular web-forum correspondence with a 3rd-generation Iraqi immigrant who advises her on her cat's cat fur allergy. The target himself bought a chemistry book in 2004, and in 2013 he took his kids on a trip to DC where they took quite a lot of photos of the Whitehouse. He's clearly a Baathist sympathiser, planning to get revenge for Saddam's execution by blowing up the president with a home-made fertiliser bomb.
- Not sure if I can go to a judge with that, it sounds a little flimsy. Also, Iraq is sooo 10 years ago. The media won't be able to scare the public with that. Got anything else?
- According to my analysis he's also a cold-war soviet sleeper agent with plans to overthrow the Disney Corporation and turn it into a Communist propaganda outlet, a white supremacist working to exterminate black people by selling hostess twinkies on ebay laced with genetically-engineered race-targeting anthrax, an anonymous teenage hacker releasing stolen CIA documents onto the web, a brainwashed North Korean agent stockpiling radium from old smoke alarms to build a nuclear bomb, a black supremacist working to exterminate white people by selling hostess twinkies on ebay laced with genetically-engineered race-targeting anthrax, a Japanese soldier who doesn't know WWII is over guarding an obscure pacific island with lethal bamboo-based booby traps, and also a beautiful Cylon infiltrator attempting to seduce a genius military systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.
- Hmm, how many pages would all this take up on paper?
- About 12,000 pages, give or take.
- Perfect! Put all the scary words in bold, add in a few thousand pages of black blocks so it looks like there was loads of real evidence but we redacted it, and then print it all out. We'll have electrodes on our target's nipples by lunchtime, and we'll all be old men before anyone can prove that we bullshitted the whole thing. Great job everyone!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:01PM
I'm afraid us pinko-commie euro types have already done Skynet [wikipedia.org].
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:23PM
The computer is your friend. Trust the computer!
(Score: 1) by theronb on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:19PM
8P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:28PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Geezer on Wednesday December 24 2014, @11:11AM
I hope I'm not the only one who finds it disturbing that the US military (in this case the Army) is funding what are ostensibly law enforcement tools.
That slope that eventually ends with the unification of military and civil authority is getting slipperier every day.