DARPA on NPR tonight

[bobchitown]

Anyone else catch the report on the new DARPA software tonight? They're developing systems that will start with one piece of data, like an email or phone number, and then use technology to mine we web for connections. NPR used female escorts as an example.

 

In the example:

 

They start with one website, capture all the phone numbers, use all those phone numbers to find connections to other ads with the same phone numbers, then look for other uses of all the OTHER phone numbers on THAT website, then look for similar photos - including picture of different people in the same room, then find all the picture taken with the same CAMERA, on and on, until they have a massive web of interconnecting threads.

 

All very big brother, and quite scarey and amazing at the same time. All done by program, no need to hand search hundreds of pieces of data.

[+ purplekow]

Six degrees of separation at the government level. Seems like a very bad device for terrorists and a very very very bad device for everyone else.

[+ deej]

I didn't see it, but as presented you've just described the modern internet that has existed for 15+ years. Nothing new here.

[+ ArVaGuy]

I'm going to agree with Deej here that this does not sound like anything new here. (Living in DC 25+ years must have gotten to me.). The security agencies have long had these capabilities. This just sounds like DARPA has enhanced the search aggregator process.

 

NSA or other agencies having this capability doesn't bother me much. It may feel Big Brotherish to some but I seriously doubt honest, law abiding citizens have anything to worry about. (Yeah, guess I have lived in DC too long.)

 

But, this falling into the wrong hands, then that's worrisome. I'm troubled that NPR used this to track down information on female escorts. This is a news outlet tracking personal information on sex workers for purposes of a demonstration. I'd say NPR unintentionally demonstrated the ill effects on private citizens when this tool is used by entities other than intelligence gathering agencies. Why didn't the reporter perform this search on themselves rather than an escort? Maybe there are some skeletons in a closet the reporter did not want revealed? (No doubt, I have lived in DC too long.)

[bobchitown]

I didn't see it, but as presented you've just described the modern internet that has existed for 15+ years. Nothing new here.

 

As the story was told, the "new" part is that they've developed technology where you can just click on one piece of data and all the searches fire up and find the entire web of information. All those linkages are then presented graphically and you can begin to click around the matrix. All the bits and pieces certainly existed, but this, as presented, seemed much easier to construct and navigate.

 

They also spent a lot of time talking about how all this stuff lived on the "dark web" which they found a way into. I think they were just talking about the part of the web not indexed by search engines.

[+ VeryHappyCustomer]

This is not new. The government is playing a game of catch-up. This technology has been commercially available for years, and is used by some of the more sophisticated digital marketing companies. I won't name them, but if you pay closer attention to the ads displayed on your own desktops and smart phones, you'll figure it out for yourselves. When you hear about such technology on the news you can be sure it's already been commercialized. If you have the patience, I'm sure you can dig up the patents.

[+ quoththeraven]

What VeryHappyCustomer says sounds right to me. My experience working for a federal agency that was thought to be more omniscient than it actually was (no, not the NSA) where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing instead has made me a cynic.

 

Government agencies are not lavished with funds -- in fact, choking off funds is part and parcel of the Republican agenda -- and aren't expected to turn a profit, so they don't have the resources or institutional culture of go-getting that private companies have. Our tech was always lightyears behind corporate America's. The government may develop important tech, like the WWW/internet, but it isn't the one who profits from it.

[+ deej]

As the story was told, the "new" part is that they've developed technology where you can just click on one piece of data and all the searches fire up and find the entire web of information.

 

You've just sort of described hypertext, the underpinning of the entire WWW.

 

As long ago as 20 years ago I worked for one of the big data aggregators. With 14 acres of raised floor in each mirrored data center, we had a LOT of data flowing through. There was one floor we weren't allowed to enter, and we weren't allowed to know who the customer was. But we all pretty much knew, and we also knew the entire internet flowed through there.

 

It's very old news.