The scope and scope of the application of the Dark Web project initially directed against terrorism can significantly exceed the already bold expectations of its time

Secret Wars Army

In the Artificial Intelligence laboratory of the University of Arizona, a research group led by Dr. Hsinchun Chen is implementing the Dark Web project. According to Physorg, its stated goal is to develop methods for systematic and continuous collection of information about all network content generated by terrorists, without exception, and its analysis.

The priority of identifying emerging and already formed ideological groups and movements is in the Network, according to the authors of the development, is obvious. The Internet, thanks to its accessibility, transparency, interactivity and external anonymity, is an ideal channel for members of terrorist groups to communicate with each other.

According to the publication, members of terrorist movements have created more than 5 thousand network resources. Many of them are multilingual. Attempts are being made to “disguise” content under outwardly “harmless” sites.

Thus, the Internet becomes a key and vital factor ensuring global coordination of terrorist actions – and, accordingly, the most vulnerable place. The analysis of network content is becoming an increasingly important source of information for intelligence analysts, at the same time, the volume of such content is increasing so rapidly that conventional methods can no longer cope with it.

The Dark Web project is designed to find a way out of the impasse. Its developers believe that the integration of the latest technologies – such as the use of network robots, hypertext link structure analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, multimedia content and emotional coloring of texts – will be guaranteed to detect, classify and monitor extremist sites.

In particular, the Dark Web project is supposed to use Writeprint technology.

It is designed to isolate semantic and structural features from multilingual texts, allowing to establish the authorship of even “anonymous” content. The declared efficiency of the technology is 95%.

True, terrorists do not sit idly by on the Web. According to Dr. Chen, they counterattack by placing special “traps” for robots on their websites and infecting special services computers with their help.

Despite all the problems, the Dark Web project has already given the first results. In particular, it was announced the completion of a comprehensive study of all Network resources containing manuals on the manufacture of improvised explosive devices.

The technologies developed on terrorists within the framework of the Dark Web project and others like it can also be used to solve much larger tasks of global governance of society. In particular, it becomes possible to identify new social groups, new forms of dissent, its carriers, and develop measures to combat it – and not only on the Internet, which is only a “litmus test” of modern society.

This, in turn, will bring us closer to the eradication of dissent and free thinking in general. What consequences this will lead to for society is still anyone’s guess.

“We use our developments to study social processes,” Dr. Chen emphasizes. “Signs of changes taking place in society are visible on the Web, and computational mathematics can help other disciplines better understand the meaning of such changes.”