New Algorithm Could Help Predict Future ISIS Attacks (thestack.com) 120
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have developed a new algorithm which may help law enforcement agencies predict potential terror attacks. The computer model has a particular focus on the behavioral patterns associated with Islamic State (ISIS) supporters...
For eight months in 2015, the researchers tracked 108,086 individual followers on ISIS-related social media pages, noting that sudden increases in the number of pages "preceded the onset of violence in a way that would not have been detected by looking at social media references to ISIS alone." According to The Stack, the University of Miami team "used a mathematical equation typically applied in physics and chemistry to monitor the development and growth of pro-ISIS groups. 'It was like watching crystals forming. We were able to see how people were materializing around certain social groups; they were discussing and sharing information -- all in real-time... This removes the guess work. With that road map, law enforcement can better navigate what is going on, who is doing what, while state security agencies can better monitor what might be developing,..."
For eight months in 2015, the researchers tracked 108,086 individual followers on ISIS-related social media pages, noting that sudden increases in the number of pages "preceded the onset of violence in a way that would not have been detected by looking at social media references to ISIS alone." According to The Stack, the University of Miami team "used a mathematical equation typically applied in physics and chemistry to monitor the development and growth of pro-ISIS groups. 'It was like watching crystals forming. We were able to see how people were materializing around certain social groups; they were discussing and sharing information -- all in real-time... This removes the guess work. With that road map, law enforcement can better navigate what is going on, who is doing what, while state security agencies can better monitor what might be developing,..."
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Algorithm? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Algorithm? (Score:5, Funny)
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Also, al-Cohn.
https://youtu.be/_mZ3UmRbAgY [youtu.be]
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The Arabic source, al-Kwarizm ‘the man of Kwarizm’ (now Khiva), was a name given to the 9th-century mathematician Ab Jafar Muhammad ibn Msa.
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Fascination. Find that on Wikipedia, did you?
Re: Algorithm? (Score:2)
Just Google word definitions
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Do you do that all the time? Pick a word out of a comment, without understanding it or the context, and post something that everybody already knew?
In case you didn't know, Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. That was the fucking joke, you twerp.
Re:Algorithm? (Score:5, Insightful)
And now it is announced that people on the terrorist watchdog list may be barred from flying on an airplane but they can still legally purchase firearms.
That's because being on a terrorist watch list isn't a criminal conviction. You can't take away someone's constitutionally protected rights just because someone, without any due process or any of the other protections guaranteed in the constitution, says they seem suspicious. All sorts of people who've had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or any Islamist leanings have wound up on the no-fly list, and had to fight for months or years to be removed. Would you support removing their freedom of speech, too? No? Why not?
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That's because being on a terrorist watch list isn't a criminal conviction. You can't take away someone's constitutionally protected rights just because someone, without any due process or any of the other protections guaranteed in the constitution, says they seem suspicious. All sorts of people who've had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or any Islamist leanings have wound up on the no-fly list, and had to fight for months or years to be removed. Would you support removing their freedom of speech, too? No? Why not?
If you do not oppose removing their right to travel, then why hold out for others? As shown, people are quite capable of being dangerous to others when not on a plane.
Either the watch list is sufficient cause to take action or it is not.
How about this as a compromise, we let the gun store owner KNOW they're on the watchlist, and they decide.
Just like we could with the plane's passengers and crew!
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Where in the American Constitution does it say that the legislature can remove someones right to bear arms?
Shit, I live in a country where we don't have the right to bear arms, but it takes a Judge to remove the privilege of owning arms as part of the sentence and it's only done when someone did something stupid with a firearm.
Algorithm poisonning (Score:1)
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Hey, hey, please, behave and be considerate. We want to fight evil, we wage war on evil, but what makes you think we'd want to get rid of it? Do you want to kill off the last industry the US is good at? Manufacturing is in China, R&D is being handed to Europe, the only thing the US are really still awesome in is blowing shit up. You can't take that away! Why do you hate America?
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Oh stop, we still make pretty good Pizza.
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Italy might want to discuss that with you.
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It isn't official Saudi foreign policy that is the problem, it is the implicit deal they struck with their Wahhabi nutjob clerics. The deal was the clerics get to run their Stazi internally looking for "vice" and to export their poison elsewhere with madrassas, all in return for letting the fat boys in the robes run what's leftover. The classical current example is Albania, now that they have their Wahhabi madrassas, they also have a militant Islam problem with their youth.
Tapping the Saudi embassies will t
How about instead... (Score:2, Insightful)
New Algorithm Could Help Predict Future ISIS Attacks
How about a new policy that could help prevent future ISIS attacks?
Does a temporary ban on immigration from conflict areas still seem unreasonable?
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Does a temporary ban on immigration from conflict areas still seem unreasonable?
Yes. It is far more reasonable to stop financing the conflict. But market dominance in the arms trade takes precedence. The immigration charade is a diversion.
Re:How about instead... (Score:4, Insightful)
Particularly because the majority of terrorist attacks in the USofA have been carried out by US citizens WHO WERE BORN IN THE USofA.
If you want to look at foreigners, those terrorists come here on tourism visas and such.
Very few immigrants commit any terrorist acts in the USofA.
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Okay, from henceforth forward, all U.S. financial support for Daesh will cease. There...doesn't appear to have stopped anything just yet, maybe they aren't on the cc list for the memo.
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This week they're financing Al Qaeda, and get very upset when the Russians bomb them [washingtonpost.com].
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Total fatalities due to terrorism in the USA (1995-2014): 3264 [umd.edu]
Total fatalities due to gun violence (2001-2013): 406,496 (source CDC)
Total fatalities due to automobiles (2001-2013): 501,462 [wikipedia.org]
So we really need to ban cars and guns?!
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That gun violence number includes suicides which is misleading. For instance, from the 2013 CDC data table 18, it gives firearms deaths at 33,636. The number of suicide by firearms is 21,175. Almost two thirds of those fatalities are intentionally self inflicted by people harming only themselves (which as a free person should be your right even if it is stupid).
12,461 people did die from gun violence in 2013 though. However, 48,545 died from poisoning deaths and only 6,637 of those were suicide. That is 4
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Now how's that going to make anyone money? How do you want to justify spending billions on security theater and smokescreens if the people are not properly scared?
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How about a new policy that could help prevent future ISIS attacks?
Does a temporary ban on immigration from conflict areas still seem unreasonable?
Let's see...since 2010...
February 18, 2010: Austin suicide attack: Andrew Joseph Stack III flying his single engine plane flew into the Austin Texas IRS building killing himself and one IRS employee and injuring 13 others. Stack left a suicide note online, comparing the IRS to Big Brother from the novel 1984.
Wouldn't help.
March 4, 2010: 2010 Pentagon shooting: John Patrick Bedell shot and wounded two Pentagon police officers at a security checkpoint in the Pentagon station of the Washington Metro rapid tran
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"Does a temporary ban on immigration from conflict areas still seem unreasonable?"
Because discriminating against people who have detailed on social media their intention to kill us for religious reasons would be racist.
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New Algorithm Could Help Predict Future ISIS Attacks
How about a new policy that could help prevent future ISIS attacks?
Does a temporary ban on immigration from conflict areas still seem unreasonable?
Wouldn't have made much of a difference in Orlando.....
Re: How about instead... (Score:1)
Or anywhere else. Muslims are already here. The war has started. Young females are the first casualties in this war. How long will England allow for its citizens to be raped and murdered by an invading force?
It is your country. Until you stop defending it. Then your country belongs to someone else.
Blood has been spilled by both sides. There is no peace with people who believe in an invisible man in the sky who has told them they alone rule this world.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386648/rotherhams-a
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Another simple solution is to well, have fucking men inside ISIS, you know, the ol good spy work, that thing NSA should actually do.
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You likely cannot do that.
ISIS often sends recruits who do not show some extreme value to their death by either fighting on the front lines or by suicide bombings. So in order to get someone on the inside (as opposed to turning someone already on the inside) they would either have to take up arms against our allies, commit a terrorist attack, or somehow help with the planning and organization of either in a way that makes them more valuable to keep around than put at risk.
What they need to do is work people
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NSA started as signals intelligence and that is its primary focus today. The human intelligence work is CIA.
And just how will the U.S. infiltrate spies into Daesh? They are not unlike a motorcycle gang or the Mafia. To get in, one has to make one's bones. So you expect the U.S. to tell its agents it is okay to knock off a few heads to gain access? Once you figure out how to clear the Geneva conventions on this, get back to us.
Okay, so maybe you want lower level access, not big shot access. Daesh's best use
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So you will end up banning innocent Muslims, and any Muslims who wish to sneak in will just pretend to be some other religion. This is the problem with simplistic solutions based on some stilted superficial understanding - they just don't work. Their only use is drawing attention to the muppets suggesting them.
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It's irrelevant only to the point of there being little difference between immigrant and native born Muslims - both being equally capable of Jihad, as both Matten and Farook/Malik showed
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Oh please, the Peace Prize is the popularity contest of the Nobel Prizes. I mean, look at the people who got one. Kissinger. Carter. And once they almost handed one to Hitler. But to be fair, Stalin was nominated too. Twice, actually.
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So, you are saying, Obama could still be wrong despite having won the prize? Are we facing something organized, however loosely (and thus possibly predictable), or just random hate-crimes [newsweek.com] and work-place violence [townhall.com]?
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What does one have to do with the other?
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More guns, less bodies. (Score:4, Insightful)
The higher the number and quality of lethal armaments that are floating around in your country/city/town, the higher the body-count from an attack will be.
The higher the percentage of the people carrying concealed weapons in your country/city/town, the higher the probability that one or more of the people in the targeted site can and will shoot back, incapacitating or killing the attacker(s) and aborting the carnage, and thus the lower the body-count from the attack will be.
The higher the probability of such a counter-action, the less likely potential terrorists will chose to attempt the attack. The body count of an attack that doesn't occur is zero.
Of course, if the venu is a gun-free zone, only the terrorist will have guns. In Florida, as with many states permitting concealed-carry, this is the case for establishments serving alcohol, such as Pulse. Oops!
That's one reason I intend to retire in Nevada, which (as of the last time I renewed) doesn't block CCW in bars and casinos. B-)
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Those who do most often shoot the wrong way and kill others instead.
Really? What percentage? Please offer some citation for that sweeping assertion.
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Law enforcement officers shoot more bystanders than lawful carrying civilians do when defending themselves and others. There is a good reason for this however; law enforcement generally shows up in response to an incident while someone on the scene before the incident has more context and a greater potential for situational awareness.
Law enforcement officers are also less law abiding than civilians who are licensed to carry but maybe they have more opportunity to be convicted of crimes.
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Or Law enforcement shoots more, outnumbering the carrying civilians by far, even aside from awareness issues. Note you said more bystanders are shot, which is different from more often they do shoot bystanders.
Actually (according to a study a few years back):
- The numbers for civilians are NOT small enough to be statistical noise: Self-defenders shoot MORE perpetrators total than police do (even though most with-gun self defence incidents don't end up with the defender actually firing a shot.)
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Actually, there's a lot of such studies (and the FBI keeps stats). You don't hear about them because with-gun crime among licensed gun owners is vanishingly small.
For instance: After Florida went to shall-issue (one of th
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Let's start by toning down the hyperbole. No one is advocating that everyone be armed. Please stop repeating this.
As long as there's people with guns and people without guns, there'll be situations where people without guns get mowed down by people with guns. And every single time the solution is more guns to more people in more places. Where does it end? Do you think a bunch of drunken people at a night club armed with guns is a good idea? You think 6-8 years olds [dailymail.co.uk] with guns is okay? You think 9yos should be firing Uzis [washingtonpost.com]? There is no end for some people, not until every toddler and up is armed 24x7. Unless they don't wa
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Tone down the hyperbole.
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What proportion of the population do you have to arm before deaths from gun massacres drop to an acceptably low number? About a third of American households have access to a gun of some sort, at least some of the time, and massacres happen. I guess we both agree that some people should not be allowed to own firearms. Children, the infirm, the insane, anyone already convicted of a violent crime, and maybe anyone on a watchlist would quickly add up to a third of the population. So we could comfortably arm two
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You have to actually allow a percentage of those firearms (the small, concealable ones) into these 'gun-free zones' that have been working out so wonderfully here lately. What that percentage should be is anyone's guess, but I'm betting it has to be greater than 0.
As an American, I live in a country where people do not think twice when they see armed guards handling their money (armored truck personnel, bank guards,
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Bzzzzt, wrong, there was an armed guard but he couldn't figure out who was shooting...you know, the lights, the dancing people, the noise.
Alcohol and firearms...nothing could go wrong with that combination yes? Guns for everyone, everywhere, and woe betide the poor motherfucker who pisses off that guy packing his penis substitute and an attitude.
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Then there's your answer. To make clubs safe from "bad guys with guns", they should all be brightly-lit rooms that serve no alcohol, that require a gun to be carried upon admission, and which have no flashing lights or music which impair the accuracy of shooting.
"More guns" == "I haven't thought this through,but 'less guns' sounds scary as I love me some guns".
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"Drunk people in clubs should be armed" - brilliant. I'm sure that'll end wonderfully. The reason that place was a gun-free zone (apart from the security, who were armed, yet this happened anyway), is because drunk people have no business being armed in public. Your solution to terrorism seems to be to make non-terrorism gun deaths so high that people won't even notice the attacks.
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Non-terrorism, non-suicide gun deaths are already so much higher than terrorism- or workplace- or hate- or school-related mass shootings that we shouldn't be noticing these things (as much as we are). In 2015, in the US, there were 22 mass shootings (defined as shootings where 4 or more people were shot). In these 22 incidents – which averaged about one every 16 days – 133 people were killed and 52 were wounded.* Around 10 times as many people are killed falling down stairs in the US each yea
Correction: predict *past* attacks (Score:1)
n/t
sounds like hydra and minority report (Score:2)
this sounds very much like "Project Insight" from Captain America Winter Soldier, and also the film "Minority Report". we know how those worked out - people got murdered or jailed for just being alive...
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Being murdered for being dead is way worse.
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Being murdered for being dead is way worse.
On the plus side, there's way less paperwork for murdering dead people.
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I call BS (Score:2)
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As they only predict potential attacks, whatever they predict will be correct, no matter how meaningless.
easy (Score:1)
The Roaches are Getting Smaller (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you miss the days of the big attacks? 9/11, Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma, embassy bombings?
If the definition of "effective policy" is "terror doesn't make the news" then there can be no effective policy. Because whatever happens, however small, if it's the biggest outrage of the year, becomes the news cycle.
The number of deaths from violence, as a percentage of human deaths, goes down every century. We now mourn ten year wars whose total casualty counts for military are less than a single week in World War 1 or II. The press is trying to define "policy failure" as "something bad happened", and whatever the worst thing happens floats above the fold. The Orlando shootings were by a rather odorous loser that women don't like, who was obsessed about filming his first person shooter rampage on his smartphone. There's no indication of any potential by the guy to ever do anything as bad as Timothy McVeigh. But there will always be kids shooting 9 people in a church or something, and the papers will always lead with that story. It's the same trend that lends to "micro-aggression" at colleges, so many real threats have been solved that we need to "drill down" to have something to be concerned about.
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It's almost like there's this human capacity to worry that can't be turned off.
I remember in college becoming worried about a class -- an upcoming test, a paper due, something like that -- and thinking, oh, if I could just get that taken care of, I'd have nothing to worry about.
As soon as I did, something else to worry about cropped up.
Bullshit (Score:1)
These algorithms never work. I'm pretty shocked how often bullshit announcements like this keep popping up. Now I'm just waiting for AI to be cheapened into some bullshit SJW propaganda project.
False positives coming your way in 3... 2... 1... (Score:2)
Not smart to reveal one's methods... (Score:1)
Great way to push ISIS communications underground where it'll be more difficult for alphabet soup agencies to analyze...
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Google make soup now?
TSA (Score:2)
Is it going to be more or less effective than TSA searches?
If i remember correctly, they failed to find potentially dangerous objects in 92% of test cases...
Trust us (Score:1)
Mass surveillance will start working for terrorism now! It really will this time!
Just forget about all the possible abuses. You should trust us with your freedom!
Only a matter of time (Score:2)
After all, it was only a matter of time to name it after the guy who invented the internet, Al Gore.
I can do that too! And far simpler... (Score:2)
Here it is: Any place and any time there will be a potential terrorist attack. Oh, you want real predictions? Funny, this magic algorithm cannot deliver those either.
Scary... (Score:1)
ROOT CAUSE (Score:1)
Since 1971 OPEC is being bullied to sell Oil exclusively in US dollars resulting in friction between 1.8 billion Muslims Worldwide and The West;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a... [qz.com]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.zerohedge.com/print... [zerohedge.com]
Red herrings (Score:1)
This will make things worse. (Score:1)
First of all, "terrorism" accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of deaths. We could and should completely ignore the issue with little or no ill effect. That would be my assessment if I were in charge, but I'm not. So instead here's my assessment of the "terror algorithm" idea...
Here's the problem. We will find patterns in the noise because humans are genetically programmed to find patterns in anything and everything. We will use the patterns we find to "predict" things that already happened, and we w
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^Doesn't understand how science works^
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