US intelligence community to brush up on literature

Well, not exatly. They're going to leave it up to computers, and the interest spans literature and spoken word, all in an effort to catch the meaning behind that, which is often elusive: metaphors.

"Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right.  Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers.

In the end the program should produce a methodology, tools and techniques together with a prototype system that will identify metaphors that provide insight into cultural beliefs. It should also help build structured framework that organizes the metaphors associated with the various dimensions of an analytic problem and build a metaphor repository where all metaphors and related information are captured for future reference and access[...]

Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency".

From: http://m.networkworld.com/community/blog/apple-my-eye-us-fancies-huge-metaphor-reposit



### END OF POST ###
www.SPYWRITER.com

How Spies Will Find You Through Your Pics

IARPA, the research body of the intelligence community, wants to know where you took your vacation:

"In an announcement for its new “Finder” program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for “locate” that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken.

More and more digital cameras today don’t just take pictures but also capture what is called metadata — often referred to as data about data — that can include everything from when the picture was taken to what kind of camera was used to where the it was taken. This metadata, often stored in a format called EXIF, can be used by different programs to understand different aspects of the image — and also by intelligence analysts to understand different aspects of the user who took it, and the people who are in it. Like who they are, what they are doing, and where and when they did it."

More: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/spies-find-you-through-pics/

Most of the metadata can be read already by anyone. Don't want to share this data with the world? Process your images through a photo-editing software before posting them online.

Spies to Predict the Future

"The theory is simple and reasonable: the more you know about what is happening right now, the better you'll be at predicting what will happen next. One United States intelligence agency is planning to do just that -- using Google, Twitter, Facebook, and anything else that provides a window on current events and trends. [...]

The kinds of sources of information that the project will be consulting are referred to as OSI, or Open Source Indicators -- such as "web search trends, blogs, microblogs, internet traffic, webcams, financial markets, and many others" according to the notice. Using "continuous, automated analysis" of these indicators, IARPA hopes to "anticipate and/or detect societal disruptions, such as political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages, and natural disasters."

More: http://hken.ibtimes.com/articles/176564/20110708/us-government-to-use-internet-to-predict-the-future.htm