Algorithms and computers won’t stop terrorism | Hacker News Reader

Algorithms and computers won’t stop terrorism

telegraph.co.uk

30 pointsedward15 comments

> If the father of a girl travelling to Syria to join Isil had no idea what she was planning, what hope does her computer have?

Algorithms can tell if you're pregnant before you know it. Wasn't that Target incident also about a father having no idea his daughter was pregnant until the machine learning algorithms indirectly informed him? I can't really trust the article's conclusions if it contradicts these well known events.

Forgive my ignorance, but what was that Target incident, and how/why algorithms informed a father that his daughter is pregnant?

I believe they're referring to [0], where Target's use of buying patterns on a loyalty card led them to send out pregnancy related vouchers to the daughter.

[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

This conclusion seems very, very misguided. Literally anyone around can know better what a girl that age is planning than her father. I think the whole article understimates very much the amount of useful information that can computers can infer. Reliable models take time to develop, so intelligence agencies are overwhelmed with false positives, but I'm increasingly confident they will get there. Target is a good POC - though it operated on a much smaller and simpler data sets, it also demonstrated how much interesting knowledge can you get out of the data.

The conclusion is classic Telegraph- where conservative values trump research or real life. A lot of their content is written to keep their readers happy- "I know my kids".

In the large scope of things, terrorist incidents are fajrly rare and committed by a tiny fraction of the population. It will be tough to come up with an accurate way to predict such a rare event.

This article is timely. For all our advances in technology, terrorism remains a social and economic issue. Technology can help us scale a solution, but it can't do it for us.

This sounds like a cop out. The people who flew into those towers were neither poor nor badly educated - so it can't be a social issue. They weren't very religious either (mohammed atta went to night clubs and drank alcohol), so what caused them to act?

It's never one single reason is my guess, The freakonomics podcast discussed factors like occupation of certain countries. Failure to integrate into a society/suffering from racism can also be a trigger.

> The people who flew into those towers were neither poor nor badly educated - so it can't be a social issue.

Social issues don't only effect the poor and badly educated. I don't see why rage born from impotence over limited prospects for oneself and one's family/identity group -- and rage at horrors that have occurred to one's family/identity group for which there is no apparent effective recourse -- which are "social issues" that come from living in impoverished countries under brutal dictatorships, or having family that do -- would not affect the decently educated and relatively well-off. Indeed, in some ways, I'd expect them to effect those people more than those who are poorly educated and personally impoverished, so that their prime struggle is meeting the needs of survival.

This seems similar to me to the way that, where a participatory political system provides avenues for resolving some dissatisfaction, the educated and economically comfortable are often more politically engaged than the poor.

The countries that are the biggest source of international terrorists are not "impoverished," relatively speaking, nor do they live under "brutal dictatorships," as far as authoritarian governments go. Egypt isn't the U.S., but it's not Malawi, or Bangladesh, or even India. In terms of per-capita income, it hangs around countries like Peru or Ukraine. The other 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi (rich), the UAE (rich), and Lebanon, a solidly middle-income country with per-capita income comparable to Mexico.

Looking further afield: Pakistan isn't significantly poorer than India, but contributes much more to international terrorism. Bangladesh is significantly poorer than Pakistan, but also contributes much less to international terrorism. When I lived in Bangladesh, it was devastatingly poor, but terrorism wasn't an issue. In 25 years, per capita GDP has quadrupled, and now it's only poor, but terrorism has become a much more significant problem.

I'd go so far as to say it's ethnocentric for Westerners to chalk terrorism up to poverty/lack of education. "Oh, these people are just poor dirt farmers, they don't know any better."

> nor do they live under "brutal dictatorships," as far as authoritarian governments go.

You are essentially saying that, among brutal dictatorships, they aren't particularly brutal dictatorships. Which may be true, but not all that significant.

> In terms of per-capita income, it hangs around countries like Peru or Ukraine.

Which are also substantial sources of terrorists, though largely internal rather than international.

> When I lived in Bangladesh, it was devastatingly poor, but terrorism wasn't an issue. In 25 years, per capita GDP has quadrupled, and now it's only poor, but terrorism has become a much more significant problem.

Which actually fits perfectly well with the point I made in the post you are responding to, that one would expect that violent solutions to problems for which the political system is not perceived to provide adequate avenues for solutions would, like political engagement on issues where the system is perceived to provide adequate avenues for solutions, be expected to increase as people reach levels where they are able to spend more effort dealing with things outside of immediate survival concerns.

> > I'd go so far as to say it's ethnocentric for Westerners to chalk terrorism up to poverty/lack of education.

And I'd go so far as to say its a strawman for you to take the suggestion that terrorism was a "social and economic issue" and instead argue against the idea that it is an issue of "poverty/lack of education", and similarly to take a suggestion about terrorism and respond to it with comparisons related to international terrorism.

Its like you've got an argument you are so keen to argue against that you can't be bothered to pay attention to what anyone else in the discussion is actually saying, you just keep repeating a canned counterargument whether or not the argument it counters is even being presented.

I am neither poor nor poorly educated (MS in CompSci). Yet when I read about the social and economic injustices in the United States, when I read about the atrocities that ISIS/ISIL and Boku-haram commits, when I see how the NSA and GHQC spying on us without warrant, I feel a sense of anger and, yes, the desire to commit violence. Obviously, I don't act on those latter feelings, as I know it will have no impact.

Education and money can only mitigate the injustice that surrounds to a certain extent.

Freakonomics had an episode recently "Is there a better way to fight terrorism?" [1] An interesting statistic they note is that occupation is the primary cause of terrorism. Rather than focus on prediction, why not focus on the causes?

[1]: http://freakonomics.com/2015/02/13/is-there-a-better-way-to-...

Focussing on the cause won't give you the side-effects (or benefits, depending on how you look at it) of installing a surveillance state / building up intelligence for economic advantages etc.

If in today’s world the act of merely "kidding" around on the internet or dropping a suitcase in front of some building, is enough to bring whole cities to a grinding halt, then the terrorist already one.

And because of this, you won't need anymore technology to stop terrorist, but the technology to remove all the fears from peoples minds. Fear and the removal of freedom are the terrorist ultimate goals, they may achieve this in part by killing people, but they also receive a tremendous amount of help by your government of choice which wants to know every little detail about you.

It's a game about visibility after all, many many more lives are lost every day due to illness and hunger than through means of terrorism. But there is no visibility, because spending money on medical research isn't as "effective" as spending it on your military / intelligence budget. Partly due to the lobbyists and partly due to the fact that helping - seemingly "random" - people won't convince your average voter, that you're actually doing something for them. Arguing about how you're protecting their children is much more convincing in the short term.

Sadly, at the moment I don't see any way out of this dilemma, except for some horrible events to take place which will wake everyone up e.g. someone newly elected using the existing surveillance mechanism in their country to install a totalitarian regime along with the mandatory secret police. Which I really hope won't happen.

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