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US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

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Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#201

Post by jacooper »

_8j50 wrote: post #10
dehrmann wrote: post #8

Plans? I assumed lots of people were already working on this. There's already a lot of training data out there, and I suspect most users can be identified by use of a handful of uncommon trigrams and sentence stats. I know you can recognize things I've written at work because they have real em dashes—people rarely type with those.

NSA already does this. "Stylometry" I believe is the term. Perhaps they used heuristics and algorithms so far? I would NLP was good enough for this years ago.

Didn't they de-annonymize Satoshi through analyzing his "stylometry" too?

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#202

Post by im3w1l »

groffee wrote: post #150
SoftTalker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do." I would have sworn that was from Elements of Style but apparently it's a Mark Twain quote.

Arguably it's that kind of thinking that's destroyed society. Dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator.

When I compare modern thinkers to those of say 150 years ago, I find that modern thinkers not only use a simpler style, the ideas are better too.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#203

Post by ProllyInfamous »

jacooper wrote: post #201
_8j50 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA already does this. "Stylometry" I believe is the term. Perhaps they used heuristics and algorithms so far? I would NLP was good enough for this years ago.

Didn't they de-annonymize Satoshi through analyzing his "stylometry" too?

Two of the people who [likely] made up "Satoshi"s core team are now deceased, RIP (Hal Finney [ALS] & Len Sussman [Suicide]).

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#204

Post by cbozeman »

groffee wrote: post #150
SoftTalker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do." I would have sworn that was from Elements of Style but apparently it's a Mark Twain quote.

Arguably it's that kind of thinking that's destroyed society. Dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator.

To quote the late philosopher Dr. Rick Roderick, "Deeply rooted in our culture is anti-intellectualism; our fear of eggheads. The work of intellectuals has always been separated off from the work of ordinary people - you have to be freed from the constraints of manual labor. When I was a dishwasher, I didn't have time to do this. Any time I was involved in manual labor, I didn't really have the time to do this intellectual work."

Most people do not have time, nor desire to do additional intellectual work after slaving away doing whatever it is they do for income.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#206

Post by midmagico »

ergodic1 wrote: post #165
black_puppydog wrote: post #157

As someone who expects this to have happened years ago (maybe not under the moniker of AI but who cares) I'm more shocked by the fact that they'd publically announce this. The chilling effects of this will be all too real. If this works it's pretty much the equivalent of a mandatory state ID on every online interaction. If it doesn't work very well, then it's going to be that, plus the risk of randomly being flagged.…

Won't there be a countermeasure? A grammarly for privacy that takes your intent and outputs an un-anonymizable text?

Yes, there's one already, it just sucks and can't be used from the command-line because the authors were academics. It's called anonymouth.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#207

Post by midmagico »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #203
jacooper wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they de-annonymize Satoshi through analyzing his "stylometry" too?

Two of the people who [likely] made up "Satoshi"s core team are now deceased, RIP (Hal Finney [ALS] & Len Sussman [Suicide]).

Both of these have been widely debunked as Satoshi candidates, especially the latter.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#208

Post by taharoto »

christophilus wrote: post #190
black_puppydog wrote: post #157

As someone who expects this to have happened years ago (maybe not under the moniker of AI but who cares) I'm more shocked by the fact that they'd publically announce this. The chilling effects of this will be all too real. If this works it's pretty much the equivalent of a mandatory state ID on every online interaction. If it doesn't work very well, then it's going to be that, plus the risk of randomly being flagged.…

> plus the risk of randomly being flagged This is 100% going to happen, so my guess is it can’t be authoritative. It’s likely to be used to whittle down a list so that humans can review the results. Feels like the beginning of a hybrid Minority Report + Enemy of the State movie. I’d watch that. I don’t want to live in that world, though.

No post body was provided.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#209

Post by RobRivera »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #126
RobRivera wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big counter intelligence man, so I love deliberately inserting randomness into potential identification metrics. In the words of martha stewart, it's a good thing

You probably don't want to associate yourself with a convicted criminal as a deflection technique.

I'm supportive of helping our convicts reintegrate into our society as healthy contributors and seeing they receive the support they need to find their niche in our diverse economy and social landscape.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#210

Post by RobRivera »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #152
RobRivera wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big counter intelligence man, so I love deliberately inserting randomness into potential identification metrics. In the words of martha stewart, it's a good thing

I wonder if there is a way to do that automatically.

rng shuffling of style and library usages, paradigms. and naming convention. camelCase vs NOCAMELCASE based on a coinflip, etc. leverage Lint static analyzer tools to enforce prior to submission.

lot of fun ways to stick it to those bulk surveillance data lakes that may be the targets of such training sets

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