DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017) | Hacker News Reader

DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017)

highergov.com

52 pointsJimmc41473 comments

I'm in Vietnam and have a bunch of extended family around. The key is social bonds. Outside of the kids' school/sports/arts they're allowed total freedom. And the variety of play (both on and offline) is astonishing. But the thing that stands out is that a good half of them are curled on a couch or hiding in a corner on their phones...and the parents don't care...because as soon as a parent asks for something to be done, the kid drops everything and jumps to do it.

By having real people around (that love them) they know that everything in the phone is less real.

first, i need to post the classic joke again...

> A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”

then, based on all the defenses and copes for this contract (and USAID) that I have seen here, I take back the conclusion that I naively drew earlier:

> Americans are heavily misled by propaganda.

No, Americans are not misled by propaganda, Americans are participating in the propaganda

such a great work, so much to learn

> such a great work, so much to learn

Is this doge meme in a political setting?

No, at least unlikely imo, this is written as a stereotype of how Russians (and people who's first language was related to Russian) often speak in English at first because of the grammar differences between the two languages.

that's interesting since i said that with my grammatical habits of chinese, or, Chinglish

but I didn't know why it looks like Russify English, can you explain more?

It might just be priming. It was setup as a Russian character so I was reading it with that in mind (and a THICC accent).

For context, this is likely related to an Elon Musk tweet earlier today https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887185381797343504 quoting Ian Miles Cheong

> Can someone explain to me why the Department of Defense provided $9,147,532.00 to Reuters for "ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)"

I guess he has to ask twitter because he doesn't actually have clearance to ask someone who would know

Narrator: he has clearance

Elon is aiming to inflame and rage bait by providing insight into what the government authorizes payments for, without context

Its working

In a very real sense, do you think its appropriate for one's government actively attempt to social engineer the population it is supposed to serve?

The grant is for "proposals in the area of automated defense against social engineering attacks."

Would you be willing to expand on that definition?

Are you referring to this part[1]?

https://www.highergov.com/document/hr001117s0050-amendment-0...

Probably, when a certain non supported narrative takes hold, Reuters is tasked with combating it with counter intel to change public narrative. This has been happening since Rome and before. Nothing new here.

Maybe you missed the 'defence' part?

That's defense of the government apparatus in the same sense as “Continuity Of Government” — not defense of constituents themselves.

Friend, I accept that there is a level of snark, when it comes to this stuff, but even rudimentary check of the website in question[1] will tell you that there are two pieces to this program:

- ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) - LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)

I presume you are being snarky about ASED. I was thinking about the other one.

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA865018C7886_970...

Where are you seeing that there’s two pieces? I’m only seeing it referred to as one program there. I’m not a govt contracts expert so by all means let me know what I’m missing.

Was the Patriot Act patriotic?

Right, just like the DoD is "defending" us.

Personally, I think that if your adversaries are doing just that, a grant with a title related to that makes sense, both to understand the problem domain and to defend against it. Yes, I would want the department of defense to be funding research in this area.

Maybe more importantly, I would not expect anyone to glean anything useful about said research from a title entry in a grants database, or maybe from anything in the grant description. I especially think it's absurd to expect an individual coming from outside government, who is unfamiliar with the details of what is going on at DARPA to pull up the title of such projects and immediately have any idea what the hell is happening. I know this from a bit of personal experience with DARPA projects.

There's a part of me that finds Musk's behavior in all of this to be a massive security breach. You can put aside any of the questions about the constitutionality of funding, this is an absurd breach of national security, both in terms of the INFSEC/IT aspect but also in terms of him casually shining spotlights on projects he knows nothing about and knows nothing of the consequences of disclosure.

It's ridiculous how much attention and handwringing there was about Wikileaks and Snowden, and yet we just let a random ignorant (in the sense of having no idea what's going on in the government — otherwise his exercise would have been unnecessary) billionaire with ties to white supremacist groups tap into the federal government and start blasting it on his personal social media platform. If this was anyone else doing these exact same actions during a different administration, they would be arrested and charged with espionage and treason immediately.

To me it's performative empty arrogance with real security consequences, both for the people whose personal information was accessed but also for national intelligence and military strategies and methods.

<< It's ridiculous how much attention and handwringing there was about Wikileaks and Snowden

The two situations are very, very different for reasons that should be relatively obvious. Musk ( via Trump ) has actual mandate to do that.

<< You can put aside any of the questions about the constitutionality of funding, this is an absurd breach of national security, both in terms of the INFSEC/IT aspect but also in terms of him casually shining spotlights on projects he knows nothing about and knows nothing of the consequences of disclosure.

This may be one point I am kinda agreeing with you on.

<< To me it's performative empty arrogance with real security consequences, both for the people whose personal information was accessed but also for national intelligence and military strategies and methods.

Maybe.. just maybe.. some of those methods should be revised in light of day.

<< Yes, I would want the department of defense to be funding research in this area.

I am genuinely of two minds about it so the question is why you think it is a good idea especially given that you also stated the following:

<< I would not expect anyone to glean anything useful about said research from a title entry in a grants database, or maybe from anything in the grant description.

Either it is ok to fund it, because you think it is a good idea or you don't know what it is and still think it is a good idea. I can accept one of those propositions.

The government works for the people. In a republic, we have a right to know how our money is being spent.

Calling attention to how the government is spending our national treasury, is a service, not a national security threat. I don't need to know the positions of the Navy Seal teams before they hit a target. I do need to know if DARPA or USAID or the CIA or the FBI is spending money and human resources in a wasteful or corrupt fashion. I do need to know if they are violating the constitution and censoring speech with OUR money. I do expect people who violate American rights to be fired at a minimum and barred from public service. We cannot be free if we cannot hold our government accountable.

Assange and Snowden should be pardoned. However, the President of the United States has unlimited authority to declassify information on whatever terms they wish.

You already had the right to know how the money is spent, you just never bothered to dig through any of the available public databases to look. That stuff has all been online for years. You are also confusing Reuters, the news organization, with Thomson Reuters, its parent company and a major vendor of information technology services.

Consider doing some more information gathering and analysis before letting your feels post.

when foreign governments and hostile intelligence groups make concerted and aggressive efforts to subvert the US population then, yes, it is appropriate for the USG to make efforts to counter subversion efforts

Context provided by the vaunted journalists at Politico, I'm sure.

If you read the proposal, this is for providing automated defences against social engineering attacks - eg: phishing. It's incredibly benign.

That's not how it's presented on Elon's twitter post, certainly. The replies are just layers and layers of conspiracy theories.

That sounds quaint. Why was it awarded to Reuters, a British/foreign news organization that supposedly hires journalists to report unbiased information? What expertise would they have in preventing social engineering attacks?

Reuters builds software for a variety of fields and maintains datasets that would be useful in identifying if, say, an email with an invoice purporting to be from a specific company aligns with the invoicing practices of that company.

It would be more accurate to compare that side of Reuters to LexisNexus, Wolters Kluwer, or perhaps Bloomberg.

Apparently Experian does a far much better job giving credit scores to Americans than Thomas Reuters does against criminal immigrants.

It was awarded to Thomson Reuters, the parent company. They do a lot of work in risk management and fraud detection, so they have a lot of expertise.

How's that working so far? Millions of illegal immigration, emptying of foreign prisons into America, development of apps to help navigate illegals into their US destinations, pacifying social media of the abovea?

Thomas Reuters apparently is helping against America ... so far.

Turn off Fox News dude - you're severely lacking perspective of your own country. Everyone outside of the US media sphere(or rather spheres - there's two) laughs at your news media and how entrenched misinformation has become.

Unlike you, I make an effort to know the who, how, when, where, what, and why:

https://github.com/egberts/immigration

You've made a diagram showing statistics of immigration encounters, and from that you deduced that prisons are being emptied into the US? Bit of a stretch. The diagram is nice, but you're missing the point: the picture being painted for you that you're trying to prop up is false.

I would like to see you paint a better diagram of the INS workflow

You continue the miss the point, I suspect on purpose.

Then be a purpose, not a naysayer or a denialist, unless you get paid to do so.

Title 42 was the main culprit of the border encounter explosion, it was used as a temporary solution to the 'asylum seeker' problem. It turned into catch and release, even the CBP agreed this was an issue because the recidivism rate was so high. That ended in May of 23' and now the only problem is working through asylum claims. Idk why everyone misunderstands the problem at the border so much.

As well as most of the people crying about this problem are unaware that Trump shot down the border bill which would have enabled officers to close up cases much quicker than judges. So do you even have a point here?

Pardon? This is about how Thomson Reuters was funded by DARPA to do a study on defending against social media attacks at scale. It has nothing to do with any of the points you brought up, and I fail to see the connection.

You said it.

I can only lead a horse to the watering hole.

https://github.com/egberts/immigration

How come they didn't detect the fraud and abuse going on in the government?

Were they hired to do fraud detection for the US government? Do you have any idea how businesses work in general? Or are you being obtuse on purpose?

Come on, man. Have some self-respect.

Thomson Reuters is an American-Canadian company. Thompson was founded in Toronto and bought Reuters in 2008. Most of it's leadership is Canadian, and to some degree American or British.

This isn't "foreign", and it has a large presence in the US

They also have a long, long history of providing services to the USG, including a lot of efforts in busting illegal immigration via shared media databases.

Thomson Reuters is Canadian. Reuters itself is based in London. It's not American.

I'm annoyed that I have to assert this, but I wasn't even aware of Elon Musk's tweet when I posted this. I found the entire site fascinating for entirely non-political reasons. I didn't know this information was publicly available.

Even if he doesn't have a clearance (he might because SpaceX), he doesn't need one. Anyone with sufficient authority can read him into any program.

It's literally an attempt to protect Americans against you, Elon.

IMC is a known Russian agent, a Malaysian national who openly writes for Putin propaganda outlet RT. Of course he wants to defund American information security.

You can do worse than RT if you watch it knowing you're seeing a curated narrative (which is no different from any paper, really, ours just happen to shill for our own state department). RT is a really good source for eg central asian news, most of which never even gets a mention in western papers.

People really need to stop throwing around "russian agent" if they want the phrase to stay scary. IMC does not need to be tied to Putin to criticize him; he's a moron who's weirdly obsessed with american conservative ragebaiting despite not having anything to do with this country. Like I can't emphasize enough how clearly stupid the man is. (Though it is also very unsurprising that he allegedly supports Putin.)

Other examples: Financial Times is a Japanese paper, so it's not the most reliable at eg reporting on China and Korea. They have surprisingly quality coverage outside of east asia, though, and from my eye they have a lot more matter-of-fact tone to american political coverage than most american papers do. Al Jazeera is not reliable for reporting on Qatar, but they're indispensable for a lot of reporting the west will refuse to engage in around the MENA world (and to a very limited extent, subsaharan africa). Etc etc.

RT has its place; it's no Epoch Times. They have some mildly interesting americans working for them who seem very willing to openly criticize Putin. The russian language version is much more blatantly propaganda.

Edit: well it seems that RT also spreads qanon stuff; I emphatically don't endorse that kind of content, nor did I realize it was there. I stand by the fact that it's a useful tool.

Seems like you went on a whole journey while writing and editing that comment! Downvotes not deserved.

My god, he’s actually acknowledging Cheong..

Meatriding has never been this successful

To be fair, Thomson Reuters is a huge company, with the Reuters news division being only one of the groups within. This may not be anything but a clickbaity title on a grant.

This kerfuffle could be quickly solved if Thomson Reuters published their grant proposal as submitted to and selected by DARPA for this program.

DARPA has a rich history of doing fundamental research but today its largely composed of engineering tasks which for whatever reason arent built by the warfare centers. The days of doing fundamental research are mostly gone in the organization. Name something in the AI/ML space that came out of DARPA in the last 15 years. CNNs- no, deep learning - no, attention - no, LLMs - no, test time training - no.

Its a good engineering org these days building cool things but there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds. The research focused has significantly waned over the last 20 years which is a shame as there are LOTS of fundamental AI/ML problems which no one is studying in industry.

AI/ML is a solution, not a problem.

DARPA’s mission is to define the problem space, not the solution space.

YES! I should add that they should be thinking about intelligence generally, not AI/ML.

A good example of this was the grand challenge with autonomous vehicles. It spurred all sorts of AI and Robotics related innovation that spun into different directions.

This almost made it to my previous reply, but the DARPA Challenge was 18 years ago.

There might be other ground-breaking challenges that DARPA did since then, I'm just not aware of them.

I believe the contribution here is overstated. None of the tech used for today's AVs relies on anything developed for grand challenge, including any principles they derived.

The leading tech today was derived purely from industry outside the dod space and cifar.

That's not the point.

The point is to put it front and center for the tech companies and the general community (think of it as a call for proposal).

Would Google have invested into self-driving if DGC had not happened? Very unclear.

Note that the initial Waymo team was a direct draft of the winning Stanford team at the DARPA Urban Challenge'07.

I think googles could care less about what darpa is doing. How would I know? I'm a darpa PM and google isn't reaching out to me or my team.

I think what you are seeing is correlation but not causation. Stanford was working on self driving long before darpa, same with cmu. The darpa money was just a bonus but I don't think it pushed anything ahead.

After the first few years of the darpa challenge, many teams were able to finish. Yet here we are in 2025 and I cam get bounding box detections on video to not jitter or drop between frames because of some unlucky pixel combination. Humans have zero issues and aren't even able to perceive these minute differences.

My guess is vision will be solve in about 18 months using methods developed purely in industry.

You need an entire community of researchers (both academic and non-academics) working on a field for industry to produce tech. It was definitely not a pure industry thing, almost no tech is.

Sure, but none of that was developed by dod in any real way. A litmus test to consider is that the dod still halls belig ml problems but you don't see phds funded by dod going to the dod. The good ones all go to industry because they know thier reseaech stops as soon as they start working for a contractor or warfare center. The money excuse is just a patsy. The government has plenty of money to pay these ppl if they can produce which they do well in industry. It's simply not a focus of darpa to do basic research in learning and intelligence in a meaningful way.

Government agencies have been behind in ML/AI for a long time now and they are still playing catch up, yes. But they do fund academia in the ML space, which is very important since industry goes nowhere without the ML PhDs who did their research with DoD funding. And they are ahead of industry in other areas, sensors being one of them.

Have u seen the work coming out of phd students on dod grants? It's generally poor. There is a lot of grant money from the big tech firms where the slide ts have access to incredible brain and compute resources.

Yes, that's basically all university research. And it probably follows the 80/20 bad/good rule like pretty much everything. Focusing on the 80% and ignoring the 20% is flawed thinking.

Research where large compute resources are required or used is a small part of all research, and a small part of ML and AI research for that matter.

You're just focusing on the positives in industry research and the negatives in university research.

> there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds

DARPA chooses real world engineering/technical problems, and then works closely with the external grantees that develop possible solutions, to solve the problem together - rapidly. Fundamental discoveries often come out of that kind of focused well resourced problem solving, but it's not really the goal.

That's what ousd is for.

Edit: Whoops. I incorrectly believed that Caffe was developed with DARPA support. I see DARPA acknowledgments on papers written at BLVC by some of the same authors, but not on Caffe itself.

Guy walks into federal office, claims to be in charge, starts plugging in his PC, demands authorization. "Social engineering" or nah?

It is only possible to "socialy engineer" people who are genualy unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living, and who are looking for a prompt that will improve there lot. The "solicitation" is absolute proof that the government has failed to provide and support the most basic requirements for a stable society, and is floundering around trying to spin the whole mess, and blame someone else. And 10 mill to one of the major media distributors is on top, of what is realy billions worth of free media coverage for anything the government want to promote. Which means they are panicking.Not that that isnt totaly obvious. They should panic, a lot, because after bieng lied to and cheated for generations now, many ordinary people have come to the reasonable and rational conclusion, that in the face of informational chaos, they can just go ahead and believe ANYTHING, that makes them feel a bit better....for now....and then believe something else later, maybe, or just make stuff up, that they believe, and there friends like, and 27 min latter, its been seen by 37 million others. And they like it, and speak directly to this, and are doing it consiously ,and dont give a rats ass about most of what is happening, and at any moment go bat shit crazy for some new revolutionary type of chewy candy, and since china is the only one who can tool up to make 4 billion dollors of candy overnight, they will get the order, and china will mint another billionair....happens every few days there is no defence

> It is only possible to "socially engineer" people who are genuinely unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living...

Brother that's all of us! If anyone here wakes up each morning and goes "yup, this is my lot in life and I wouldn't change a thing" then please share your secret!

Doesn't that seem a bit too complacent? Personally I've always thought the opposite - malcontents have more to gain and less to lose by criticizing or opposing the status quo.

You would have been right when the ratio of malcontents to those who could say that they enjoyed the benifits of society was 5 or 10 to 1 but tose days are gone, and in many geographic (read postal codes) locations, there is nothing to be contented with or strive for, except at worse than lightnigng strike while winning the lottery odds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com