US Government Working on AI-Powered Stylometry Technology

~2 min read | Published on 2022-10-01, tagged AIGeneral-News using 390 words.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is working on a program that will use “artificial intelligence technologies capable of attributing authorship.”
Put another way: the government is creating a program that uses artificial intelligence to identify or fingerprint anonymous authors.
IARPA is the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Office of the Director of National Intelligence



“Each of the selected performers brings a unique, novel, and compelling approach to the HIATUS challenge,” said program manager Dr. Tim McKinnon. “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.”
The DNI press release:
“WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, today announced the launch of a program that seeks to engineer novel artificial intelligence technologies capable of attributing authorship and protecting authors’ privacy.”

“The Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program represents the Intelligence Community’s latest research effort to advance human language technology. The resulting innovations could have far-reaching impacts, with the potential to counter foreign malign influence activities; identify counterintelligence risks; and help safeguard authors who could be endangered if their writing is connected to them.”

The program’s goals are to create technologies that:
  • Perform multilingual authorship attribution by identifying stylistic features — such as word choice, sentence phrasing, organization of information — that help determine who authored a given text.
  • Protect the author’s privacy by modifying linguistic patterns that indicate the author’s identity.
  • Implement explainable AI techniques that provide novice users an understanding, trust, and verification as to why a particular text is attributable to a specific author or why a particular revision will preserve an author’s privacy.[/list]
  • “Through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement, IARPA awarded HIATUS research contracts to the following lead organizations, which together bring more than 20 academic institutions, non-profits, and businesses into the program:
  • Charles River Analytics, Inc.
  • Leidos, Inc.
  • Raytheon BBN*
  • SRI International
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Southern California
  • “The HIATUS test and evaluation team consists of Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Pacific Northwest National Labs, and the University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security.”



    IARPA Kicks off Research Into Linguistic Fingerprint Technology | www.dni.gov, archive.is, archive.org

    Comments (11)


    fedfighter2022-10-02
    2065d320

    To remain unidentified, one should try to imitate other users' way of writing in a community, basically "when in Rome, do as Romans do", it may mislead law enforcement and help blend into the crowd. Other tips are: basic wording, paying attention to capitalization, grammar, regional differences (colour insted of color), punctuation and other characteristics that might not be obvious (some people have specific way of writing, make unique mistakes).

    king2022-10-02
    023a0d90

    Did any of yall bother to read these two bulletpoints? -> Protect the author’s privacy by modifying linguistic patterns that indicate the author’s identity. -> Implement explainable AI techniques that provide novice users an understanding, trust, and verification as to why a particular text is attributable to a specific author or why a particular revision will preserve an author’s privacy. In other words, at the same time they're developing this technology they're writing the cliff notes on how it can be circumvented. That means an AI to rewrite your writing samples you post anonymously to prevent being identified would be soon to follow. That makes this a nothingburger.

    dfsadf2022-10-04
    34351630

    >That makes this a nothingburger Dogshit, authors still need to ACTIVELY circumvent this type of surveillance, which they need to do by dispensing of any detectable idiosyncracy in their writing (or by using several styles - distinct to a sophistacated stylometry engine - and maintaining separation between them). Analytical techniques like this always spiral into an arms race, you can use modern tech to beat past tech but future tech will have you pinned. Even a technically sophisticated author won't be able to predict all the metrics their advesaries will use. Hence best way of beating high tech adversaries is no tech. We just have to hope stylometry is an inherently limited tracking technique. You could probably get some English major journalist to run this story under the pretext that it spelled the death of the psuedononymous author, and that the only way to protect your identity is to conform to the uninspired normie droll, big brothers way of beating you into a conforming drone.

    🦢2022-10-04
    9c552c70

    ***just not true***, have faith in nothing for that is all we can truly have faith in 🦢

    0x420d9109fjqqt2022-10-04
    d6a73c40

    Prolly doesnt even need to be that complex. Existing article spinners would probably do the trick, SEO cmopanies have been using them for years. This announcement seams more like a threat than anything to worry about, unless you're an active blogger and also doing weird shit elsewhere

    Jew2022-10-06
    d12afd20

    Meh, can prob bypass by running text back and forth through translate a few times

    notyourbusiness2023-05-02
    40d1c267

    I do not want to think about what China or some autocracy might do with this type of technology. Perhaps the same shit that the always have done, but with much more people.

    Verizon2022-10-02
    829c48c0

    Meanwhile, ***DeSnake*** is back there like ***right***, hahaha that dude exists, so does ***Bunt***, mahn and this dude is like the internet is all traceable, I mean scientifically correct but in reality it’s so no/***false***, half of the fucking world hasn’t even been vaccinated from ***covid-19***, and he’s got ***alien*** technology to crack good encryption these days or keep tabs on ***big tech*** like Verizon, even aliens are fucked over with their customer support…

    6454452022-10-02
    27f25150

    @a8a6411a I can't tell how long you can be "relatively anonymous on budget" as everyday it shows that the governments are implementing new ways to destroy people's privacy and anonymity. They are bypassing every precaution being used for hiding identity and even bypassing their own laws with their parallel investigation and "enhanced interrogation techniques". They aim to crack monero and GPG for the moment. What did they left? nothing. I hope when they get holds everything that every dnm user leave them looking for nothing cuz there is no point using the Internet, really. Freedom isn't free never was never will be.

    Proper2022-10-02
    7c878230

    Ya man, and proper ***grammar too***

    uni2022-10-04
    096fed10

    > The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for mankind. Ayo DNL you aint thinkin' on e-mailing out e-mailbombs to various internet institution directors is ya?