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This is of course by why naive keyword-based watch lists are total
failures. And I would be shocked if any serious intelligence agency
actually used them for real.<br>
<br>
Given that people's Facebook likes give pretty good predictions of
who they are (indeed, better than many friends)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802.short">http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802.short</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.abstract">http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.abstract</a><br>
there are better methods if you happen to be a big intelligence
agency.<br>
<br>
Still, while text and other online behavior signal a lot about a
person, it might not be a great tool for making proper watchlists
since there is a lot of noise. For example, this paper extracts
personality dimensions from online texts and looks at civilian mass
murderers:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/30/comjnl.bxv109.full">http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/11/30/comjnl.bxv109.full</a><br>
<br>
They state:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans
Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures:
normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: 2;
text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none;
white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important;
float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Using this
ranking procedure, it was found that all of the murderers' texts
were located within the highest ranked 33 places. It means that
using only two simple measures for screening these texts, we can
reduce the size of the population under inquiry to 0.013% of its
original size, in order to manually identify all of the
murderers' texts.</span></blockquote>
<br>
At first, this sounds great. But for the US, that means the
watchlist for being a mass murderer would currently have 41,000
entries. Given that over the past 150 years there has been about 150
mass murders in the US, this suggests that the precision is not
going to be that great - most of those people are just normal
people. <br>
<br>
The deep problem is that there is not enough positive data points
(the above paper used seven people) to make a reliable algorithm.
The same issue cropped up with NSAs SKYNET program,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)</a> - they
also had seven positive examples and hundreds of thousands of
negatives, and hence had massive overfitting (suggesting the
Islamabad Al Jazeera bureau chief was a prime Al Qaeda suspect). <br>
<br>
<br>
As for myself, I better be on a watchlist. If not, we are in deep
trouble.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2016-09-08 23:39, BillK wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAL_armg3LAF2-McP+E_r4UPrHGJK5fu3NBh14R=qjAVA7x-6RA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">This Hilariously Cruel Hoax Tweet Just Put Lots Of People On NSA's Radar
An act of next-level trolling genius yesterday made many a gullible
Googler ask the main question one shouldn't ask about ISIS.
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://www.fastcocreate.com/3063548/image-of-the-day/this-hilariously-cruel-hoax-tweet-just-put-lots-of-people-on-nsas-radar"><https://www.fastcocreate.com/3063548/image-of-the-day/this-hilariously-cruel-hoax-tweet-just-put-lots-of-people-on-nsas-radar></a>
---------------
Don't Google it! You know you want to, but don't! Just don't!
BillK
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</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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