
Automatic Detection of Cyber-Recruitment by Violent Extremists - jcr
http://www.security-informatics.com/content/3/1/5/abstract
======
Zigurd
I hope the researchers a re well-meaning and that the study is more
sophisticated than the abstract makes it seem, but it seems to have multiple
potential problem areas:

One-dimensional "extremism." Can they detect "white power" recruitment?
Environmental extremist recruitment? It seems too easy to rate "angry and in
the Middle East" as "terrorist."

If it's too easy to score a hit, it may be too easy to avoid a false positive.
What's the system's real capability of avoiding a false positive?

There is no comparison to current "best practices" such as they are. How does
the FBI select extremists for surveillance? Does this do a better job?

~~~
rspeer
You can see the curve of false positives and false negatives in the paper. As
one example, finding half of the extremist recruiters involves about labeling
about 2% of benign posts as extremist recruiters. It's not promising if you
think that they'll automatically suspect people of being terrorists based on
this classifier, but it _could_ be used responsibly as a filter for a human to
follow up on.

I assess from the paper that they're specifically looking for Islamist
extremist recruiters and not even considering any other type of extremists in
this model.

Overfitting to suspect people with Arabic names would be a concern. (You know
the classic 20 Newsgroups classification problem? Any algorithm that does
particularly well at it is just overfitting to the names and signatures of
people who posted in each newsgroup.)

~~~
Zigurd
2% false positives? That's terrible, because it's not scaled to the ratio of
benign posts to recruiting posts. That is, at a 2% rate, false positives
could, perhaps vastly, outnumber accurate hits.

One reason I mentioned other kinds of extremists is their method of using
judges to manually rate posts. It could well be that Americans, in particular,
have a media-formed consensus on what an islamist extremist is. Tree-sitters,
antivivisectionists, anti-abortion, etc. "extremism" could be harder to judge,
and that could jack up the error rate considerably.

------
westernmostcoy
This currently goes to a landing page that makes it look like you need to sign
up first to read the article. That's not actually true, clicking 'full text'
on the right hand sidebar will take you to what may have been a better link to
post here:

[http://www.security-informatics.com/content/3/1/5](http://www.security-
informatics.com/content/3/1/5)

------
gesman
I detected a violent requirement to sign-up first to read the article.

Ideas are possibly interesting but this approach doesn't help to attract more
readers.

~~~
jcr
There is no requirement to sign up. The link is to the abstract, but if you
read it and find it interesting, there are two links to the full paper, as
both pdf and text.

[http://www.security-
informatics.com/content/pdf/s13388-014-0...](http://www.security-
informatics.com/content/pdf/s13388-014-0005-5.pdf)

------
NegativeLatency
I refuse to sign up

