U.S. Intelligence Wants to Unmask Anonymous Writers Using AI
September 28th, 2022Cryptogon 2013: Linguistics Identifies Anonymous Users:
Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say.
The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks.
“If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.
“Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you’ll probably use the same function words in chat messages.
“Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away.”
Via: Register:
The US intelligence community has launched a program to develop artificial intelligence that can determine authorship of anonymous writing while also disguising an author’s identity by subtly altering their words.
The Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) aims to build software that can perform “linguistic fingerprinting,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said.
“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA said [PDF].
With the right model, IARPA believes it can identify consistencies in a writer’s style across different samples, modify those linguistic patterns to anonymize writing and do it all in a manner that is explainable to novice users, ODNI said. HIATUS AIs would also have to be language agnostic.
“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,” said HIATUS program manager Dr Timothy McKinnon.
