Careful What You Write

Posted 27 September, 2007 in Uncategorized |

In the movie Seven, Detectives Somerset and Mills track down the killer they’re after by paying off a federal agent — who Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, calls “a friend from the Bureau” — to access the FBI’s database of library records. By looking at the lists of “flagged books” that have been fed into the FBI’s computer, Somerset and Mills are able to put together a profile of the man they think they are hunting for. But Mills, the younger detective played by Brad Pitt, is skeptical: “It could get us the name of some college kid writing a term paper on twentieth-century crime.”

In the context of the film, it is quite clear that the tactics Somerset and Mills employ are, at best, ethically sketchy.

They pale in comparison to the new Dark Web scheme cooked up by Hsinchun Chen of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona. According to an article in Wired, this ambitious plan will scour the Web and monitor the writing patterns of bloggers and other Web writers, then compare syntax, vocabulary, style, etc. against the writing patterns of known terrorists as a means of assessing who is likely to be involved with terrorist organizations, or who is most susceptible to radicalization:

The University of Arizona’s ultra-ambitious “Dark Web” project “aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web,” the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which “identif[ies] and track[s] individual authors by their writing styles.

Calling this new technology “an invaluable tool in the war against terror,” the National Science Foundation writes:

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.

Of course, the NSF article goes on to point out, there are risks involved with this kind of project: “‘They [terrorist organizations] can put booby-traps in their Web forums,” Chen explains, “and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines.’”

Silly me. When I heard “risks” I was thinking more of some political blogger who happens to use similar syntax to known terrorists getting picked up off the street and loaded onto a plane for Syria. But in the war on terror, I suppose this kind of “collateral damage” is perfectly acceptable.

(via Bookninja.)

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