{"id":65408,"date":"2023-06-09T12:56:51","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T17:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65408"},"modified":"2023-06-09T12:56:51","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T17:56:51","slug":"dhs-sought-to-assign-social-credit-style-risk-scores-to-social-media-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65408","title":{"rendered":"DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users"},"content":{"rendered":"
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DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to\u00a0develop a project, dubbed \u201cNight Fury,\u201d designed to analyze and assign \u201crisk scores\u201d to social media accounts.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Brennan Center for Justice procured these documents through a public records request, and\u00a0Motherboard<\/a>\u00a0was the first to report on them. Project Night Fury aimed at utilizing automation to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to terrorism, illegal opioid distribution, but also disinformation campaigns.<\/p>\n

The DHS document stated,\u00a0\u201cThe Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or \u2018Risk Score,\u2019 associated with the identified accounts.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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source: Motherboard<\/em><\/p>\n

Project Night Fury had also planned on incorporating involvement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide \u201ccross-mission operational context,\u201d according to one of the documents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Experts had warned DHS about the inherent difficulties and biases involved in automated judgment for these matters, citing that characteristics like being \u201cpro-terrorist\u201d have no concrete definition.<\/p>\n

Notably, DHS terminated Project Night Fury in 2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, it underscores the agency\u2019s continued interest in social media as a resource for analysis.<\/p>\n

This comes in the wake of earlier reports of CBP utilizing an AI-powered tool, Babel X, for\u00a0analyzing travelers\u2019 social media at US borders.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

While Night Fury\u2019s focus was initially on \u201ccounter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding\/characterizing\/identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities,\u201d the documents indicate that UAB\u2019s work was\u00a0intended to \u201cscale to other DHS domains\u201d and \u201cbuild next generation capabilities.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to\u00a0develop a project, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[33844,2289,5570,33845,33847,33848,9639,33846],"class_list":["post-65408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cindy-harper","tag-dhs","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-reclaimthenet-org","tag-social-credit-scores","tag-university-of-alabama-at-birmingham","tag-us-department-of-homeland-security","tag-us-dhs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65409,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65408\/revisions\/65409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}