Sonntag, 20. April 2014

Geheimdienst-Chatbots verwickeln Pädophile und politisch Verdächtige in Internet-Gespräche

Klingt reißerisch, diese Überschrift? Nicht reißerisch genug, meint die amerikanische Electronic Frontier Foundation:
According to an inadequately redacted document publicly available on the federal government’s contracting site, FBO.gov, Sgt. Star is built on technology developed for the FBI and CIA more than a decade ago to converse with suspects online. From the document: LTC Robert Plummer, Director, USAREC PAE, while visiting the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) in late 2003, discovered an application developed by NextIt Corporation of Spokane, WA, that PNNL identified for the FBI AND CIA. The application used chat with an underlying AI component that replicated topical conversations. These agencies were using the application to engage PEDOPHILES AND TERRORISTS online, and it allowed a single agent to monitor 20-30 conversations concurrently.
Will sagen, es geht den Verfolgungsbehörden nicht nur ums Mitlesenm Mithören und Zuschauen, sondern ums automatisierte Aushorchen. Wie paranoid muss ich werden?
As in the context of data mining, a computer equipped with artificial intelligence is capable of engaging thousands of individuals simultaneously, twenty-four hours a day. But here the agent is able to leverage the power of computers to persuade via carefully orchestrated social tactics known to elicit responses in humans. In an age of national security and targeted advertising, citizen and consumer information is at an all time premium. Techniques of AI and HCI [Human-Computer Interaction] create the opportunity for institutions to leverage the human tendency to anthropomorphise and other advantages computers hold over humans (ubiquity, diligence, trust, memory, etc.) to facilitate an otherwise impracticable depth and breadth of data collection.