20
Jul
Pentagon Studies Blogs as Anti-terror Fighting Tool
The Defense Department is seeking to create a powerful and sophisticated new weapon to help win the Global War on Terror –-a blog search engine. “We’re out to make a machine that will analyze blogs in real-time,” says Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, a senior scientist for the defense contractor charged with development of the new terror-fighting tool.
Can blogs really help “information analysts and warfighters” combat terrorism? The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is betting nearly half a million dollars that the answer is “Sir, Yes Sir!”
The money will go to a Massachusetts firm called Versatile Information Systems Inc., to pay for a 3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”
In plainer English, that translates into the creation of a “topic-specific blog search and analytic tool that will apply novel metrics” to analyze links and patterns within the blogosphere, according to Ulicny. Those patterns include the content of blogs as well as hyperlinks contained within them. “The focus will be on those that are part of the national security and foreign relations domain,” Ulicny explains. “After all, the Air Force is not particularly interested in blog postings about Lindsay Lohan.
“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” says Ulicny.
“Link/citation analysis works great in classic information retrieval, but blogs function in another way.” One of the problems analysts have with blog monitoring, he says, is that there is too much “actionable information” to analyze properly. Therefore, says Ulicny, “We are developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are most interested in at a point in time.”
Major Amy Magnus, project manager for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is funding the effort, says bloggers are “very interesting to us” because they are seen as “experts in their fields” who lead “a community of people in rich discussion within a narrow field.”
As Major Magnus points out, however, “some bloggers are credible and some are not.” (Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin, are you listening?) “A big part of the game is to figure out who is credible,” she says. “What news can you trust?” Another area of concern is that of “actionable information,” says Magnus. “How to define it is a big issue.”
While cautioning that she is part of a “basic research organization,” Magnus admits, “We definitely want to use this to monitor Islamic blogs. It’s important to understand other cultures, and blogs give insight into them. Blogs provide a real service by taking loosely linked information and giving it focus and a means of reaching consensus.
“The blogosphere is a really powerful medium,” Magnus concludes. “Bloggers invoke a kind of discipline among their kind, which we see as a parallel to what we call an ‘advocacy chain’ in which everyone from a general to a private can feel comfortable.”
But should the rest of us feel comfortable with this powerful new search engine cum terror-fighting weapon in the hands of the Pentagon? After all, in the wake of recent terror bombings in Mumbai, the Indian government directed local Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that host blogs. Leading bloggers promptly accused the government of creating a dangerous precedent of censorship. Indian authorities cited “security reasons” and “anti-national sentiments” when asked to explain why the sites had been jammed, but some analysts speculated that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations.
Recent revelations about warrantless wiretapping and other forms of possibly illegal and unconstitutional spying and snooping by our own government hardly inspire confidence — but both Ulicny and Magnus say there is no need to worry.
“Blogs are all open source and published to the whole world,” says Ulicny. “So there’s no reasonable expectation or sense of privacy. Also, we’re not looking to use this tool to censor but to get some of people’s reactions to news in the national security and foreign affairs domain. Our focus is not domestic, but instead on bloggers hailing from or posting about international areas.”
“There is some concern in the blogosphere about what we are looking at,” concedes Major Magnus. “But this is definitely not about censorship of any type. I believe very strongly in diversity of opinion and rich discourse. That’s what makes the blogosphere so important in the first place.”
Their words are reassuring, but in the face of continuing attacks such as the recent train bombings in Mumbai, the potential for abuse of the “iBlog project” (as Ulicny informally refers to it) remains strong, and continuing vigilance will be required. After all, as Versatile Information Systems’ head Mitch Kokar notes, “The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts. Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace.” Should Donald Rumsfeld ever conclude that censoring blogs — instead of merely monitoring them — is necessary to combating terror within the “information battlespace,” what do you think will happen?
Are you aware of the products of AdZone Research? Stock symbol ADZR. They have had a anti-terror search product, like you describe, that they have been trying to sell to HSD/DOD for several years. It is basically a web site crawler that traverses links, capable of searching in middle eastern native languages, and able to detect secret messages embedded in vidio/audio files by stegonography. It has an AI-based Database backend for doing sophisticated data-mining types of operations. It is a very advanced product and already “certified” by a government lab. So your recent article just further piques my interest as to why the DOD/NSA never bought this product. AdZone finally “re-targeted” their product to search message rooms for pedophiles soliciting sex with children, and is currently being sold under the name of OPPS!. It is already successful at that endeavor. Check it out. It might be of interest as background on the wider subject.
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:56 pmLook here: http://www.adzoneinteractive.com/
Good Luck. Jeff
The whole problem is this. In America we have known for at least twenty years that oil was the premier problem we would have to tackle in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The decisions that were made along the way are extremely troubling. Rather than push for legislation that would encourage fuel efficient cars, legislation was pushed to discourage fuel efficient cars. Rather than compel the auto and oil industries to increase R&D in the area of transportation systems that wouldn’t require oil in the interest of national security any research and development that these industries did do was abandoned. We have known for at least twenty yeatrs now that the CO2 emmitted from automobiles was going to act like a blanket warming our fragile planet, yet we required nothing from our transportation sector to mitigate this looming problem. Now we have SUV’s and Hummers and Trucks on the road that require significant volumes of oil based fuels to provide daley transportation. We are now in a tactical bind in that if the oil supply falters, our economy collapses. The absolute blind stupidity of the last twenty years of our leaders have left us in a position where we either park our cars, we fight, or we turn back to the stone age. The only way out of this mess is the only way out that has ever existed and that is to move beyond our fossil fuel world and do what is necessary to develop any alternative that can see us to the end of the twenty-first century. Hydrogen Plasma Fusion is the only technology that I know of that has any promise at all of providing the quantity of energy that could keep our economy afloat with any hope of developing to the full extent of our imaginations. But it requires completely changing our transportation system. No longer would we have the personal car, but rahter a comprehensive electric rail system that could realistically usher us to where we need to be as fast as the current fastest sports car could get us there. But rahter than one 1.3 million dollar car speeding one person to their destination at 250 miles per hour, everyone could expect to arrive in a comparable time as that one person is his or her sports car could arrive. We would all have to be employeed in making the transition to the new economy. There would be no time for empire building as we would be employed in hte interest of our own survival. Can you imagine how far half a trillion dollars worth of development of hydrogen plasma fusion and all electric rail system could advance us along the way to complete replacement of oil dependent systems. Some say our future lies in the stars. If we don’t very very soon make the effort to go beyond our primative oil based economy, we will never have to comtemplate the stars ever again. The oil companies, this president, the auto industry are leading us all to ruin. We need what resources we have left from the wanning days of the past age to leap into a new world that is again alive and vibrant. A world where we no longer need eight lane roads that force us to pave vast expanses of cultivatable land. A world where our technology begins to blend with the environment and compliment our diverse world rather than turning it into nothing more than an uncomfortably hot parking lot. We all have to say NO to these leaders who only imagine death and destruction. Now that they have led us into desparation, they feel that they have to imprison us so that we don’t pay them back for their foolish, selfish and desctructive decisions. Retribution is not the answer. What we need to do is stop listening to these leaders that have led us down the brimstone path and begin walking in any other direction than the destructive one we are on.
Timothy Michel
http://www.stateofthepeople.org/
July 25th, 2006 at 7:17 pm