
Ask HN: Any statrups to fight terrorism? - urahara
Are there any startups that aim to fight&#x2F;prevent terrorism in any way, on any level, be it government or personal? Predict it or deal with consequences more effectively?
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chatmasta
Start by reading up on "open source intelligence," which is just a fancy way
of saying "a whole bunch of web scraping." There's a lot of info you can
gather from scraping public/semi-public data sources, applying some automated
analysis, and overlaying info on maps. Then all you've got to do is find a
government agency willing to pay you for it.

Or maybe you could build an army of twitter bots, write some sockpuppet
management software, and sell that... I hear the US is lagging behind its
enemies in that regard.

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quuquuquu
This would be like what, NSA as a service?

It seems like a very tough problem to me.

You would probably be best to narrow the scope of the problem, like, "ok I
want to predict the probability of an attack happening on just one train
station."

Then you would need real time data of everyone coming and going. Real time
data of metal detectors, fluid detectors, contents of garbage bags, pressure
plates on floors and walls (for bags that are left behind).

There are a lot of vision, AI, GPS, demographic data problems that would all
go into solving this problem. And there will be a ridiculous amount of false
positives.

You probably would be better off training AI to identify needles in haystacks,
or flakes of gold in a pan

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PaulHoule
This company invests in them:

[https://www.iqt.org/](https://www.iqt.org/)

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2_listerine_pls
I know it's a CIA fund, but what's the point of investing negligible amounts
in a wide variety of companies?

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jamesmishra
It is an investment thesis that has worked for Y-Combinator.

And of course, the US government is an entity capable of absorbing investment
losses -- but benefits greatly from potential advances in defense technology.

