Tag: iarpa

The Intelligence Community’s Latest Novelty, Spy Underwear, Puts Us Closer to the Totalitarian Dystopia Described in Science Fiction Novels

In 1921, just after the Russian Revolution, Yevgeny Zamyatin published a dystopian science fiction novel, We, in which a spacecraft engineer lives in a futuristic city made of glass enabling government authorities to track everything that people do at every moment of the day.

The novel influenced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley who wrote prophetic warnings about state surveillance and totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Brave New World (1932).

Slowly but surely the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are helping to transform Zamyatin’s worst nightmare into reality—albeit with a twist. Rather than having to build cities full of glass, they have perfected development of sophisticated computer technologies that allow them to spy on everyone without the people knowing when they are doing it.

In late August, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched a $22 million program designed to develop computerized clothing, including spy underwear fitted with cameras, sensors and microphones capable of recording audio, video and geolocation data.

According to the Office of the DNI, the newly developed eTextile technology, ideally could assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.[1]

The new technology, however, brings with it a serious dark side, giving the government the ability to insidiously spy on everyone all the time—without them ever knowing it. Journalist Annie Jacobsen told The Intercept that the intelligence agencies “want to know more about you than you.”

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United States Government Has Plans of Creating an AI that Can Expose Anonymous Writers

According to a recent announcement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) is developing a program to unmask anonymous writers. IARPA will use AI to analyze anonymous writers’ style. According to Cindy Harper of Reclaim the Net, a writer’s style “is seen as potentially being as unique as a fingerprint.” 

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA stated.

If IARPA succeeds with its venture, it believes that the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program could identify a writer’s style from multiple samples and change those patterns to increase the anonymization of the writing. 

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” declared HIATUS program manager Dr. Timothy McKinnon.

On top of that, IARPA said it will create explainability standards for the program’s AIs.

ODNI revealed that HIATUS could have several applications, which includes fighting foreign influence activities, defending writers whose work may potentially endanger them, and identifying counterintelligence risks. Per McKinnon, the program can identify if a machine generated or a human being wrote the text.

However, Harper noted that “it is not IARPA’s work to turn HIATUS into something usable. The agency’s work is only to develop the technology.” Regardless, it’s becoming clear that the ruling class has it in for anonymous writers and those who use pen names. 

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US government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said that the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) is working on a program to unmask anonymous writers by using AI to analyze their writing style which is seen as potentially being as unique as a fingerprint.

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA said.

If successful, IARPA believes the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program could identify a writer’s style from different samples and modify those patterns to further anonymize the writing.

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” said HIATUS program manager Dr. Timothy McKinnon.

IARPA said that it will also develop explainability standards for the program’s AIs.

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IARPA Project Aims to Identify People from Drones by More Than Just Their Face

The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.  

Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.

“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”

Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.

As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”

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IARPA Developing AI To Help Predict The Future

As far as secretive government projects go, the objectives of IARPA may be the riskiest and most far-reaching. With its mission to foster “high-risk, high-payoff” programs, this research arm of the U.S. intelligence community literally tries to predict the future. Staffed by spies and Ph.D.s, this organization aims to provide decision makers with real, accurate predictions of geopolitical events, using artificial intelligence and human “forecasters.”

IARPA, which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, was founded in 2006 as part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Some of the projects that it has funded focused on advancements in quantum computing, cryogenic computing, face recognition, universal language translators, and other initiatives that would fit well in a Hollywood action movie plot. But perhaps its main goal is to produce “anticipatory intelligence.” It’s a spy agency, after all.

In the interest of national security, IARPA wants to identify major world events before they happen, looking for terrorists, hackers or any perceived enemies of the United States. Wouldn’t you rather stop a crime before it happens?

Of course, that’s when we get into tricky political and sci-fi territory. Much of the research done by IARPA is actually out in the open, utilizing the public and experts in advancing technologies. It is available for “open solicitations,” forecasting tournaments, and has prize challenges for the public. You can pretty much send your idea in right now. But what happens to the R&D once it leaves the lab is, of course, often for only the NSA and the CIA to know.

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