MetaSecurity

The Center For Social Cohesion in the UK has published a report titled ‘ The Virtual Caliphate: Islamic Extremists and their Websites’.

Download pdf here.

article from forbes magazine

MICHAEL HILL

The Associated Press

TROY, N.Y.–Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

But first, a virtual reality check.

Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of “Second Life.” He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like “Where are you from?” but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic.

“Second Life” is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don’t have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills.

And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems – like, say, creating a virtual human – right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Researching in virtual realities has become increasingly popular the past couple years, said Mateas, leader of the school’s Expressive Intelligence Studio for AI and gaming.

“It’s a fantastic sweet spot – not too simple, not too complicated, high cultural value,” he said.

Bringsjord is careful to point out that the computations for Edd’s mental feats have been done on workstations and are not sapping “Second Life” servers. The calculations will soon be performed on a supercomputer at Rensselaer with support from research co-sponsor IBM Corp.

Operators of “Second Life” don’t seem concerned about synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based company sees a “fascinating” opportunity for AI to evolve.

“I think the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled avatars and let them free in ‘Second Life,’” Lester said, “… let them randomly walk the grid.”

That is years off by most experts’ estimations. Edd’s most sophisticated cognitive feat so far – played out in “Second Life” and posted on the Web – involves him witnessing a gun being switched from one briefcase to another. Edd was able to infer that another “Second Life” character who left the room during the switch would incorrectly think the gun was still in the first suitcase.

This ability to make inferences about the thoughts of others is significant for an AI agent, though it puts Edd on par with a 4-year-old – and the calculus required “under the hood” to achieve this feat is mind-numbingly complex.

A computer program smart enough to fool someone into thinking they’re interacting with another person – the traditional Holy Grail for AI researchers – has been elusive. One huge problem is getting computers to understand concepts imparted in language, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

AI agents do best in tightly controlled environments: Think of automated phone programs that recognize your responses when you say “operator” or “repair.”

Bringsjord sees “Second Life” as a way station. He eventually wants to create other environments where more sophisticated creations could display courage or deceive people, which would be the first step in developing technology to detect deception.

The avatars could be projected at RPI’s $145 million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, opening in October, which will include spaces for holographic projections. Officials call them “holodecks” in homage to the virtual reality room on the “Star Trek” television series.

That sort of visual fidelity is many years down the line, just like complex AI. John Kolb, RPI’s chief information officer, said the best three-dimensional effects still require viewers to wear special light-polarizing glasses.

“If you want to do texture mapping on a wall for instance, that’s easy. We can do that today,” Kolb said. “If you want to start to build cognitive abilities into avatars, well, that’s going to take a bit more work.”

Consumer guide to virtual worlds - published by the Association of Virtual Worlds can be

downloaded here.

Senate report on the Internet and homegrown terrorist threat.

Can be downloaded here.

The excellent Dark Web project at Arizona Universities Artificial Intelligence Lab has recently completed research into the use of Web 2.0 media by International jihadi groups. While fascinating in some respects it also clearly demonstrates how traditional text-mining attempts to collect data can be applied to some Web 2.0 applications, but miss the mark with virtual worlds.

The leader of the lab Dr. Chen kindly forwarded their research paper to me and it can be linked to here (Cyber Extremism in Web 2.0: An Exploratory Study of International Jihadist Groups or here). In essence the Dark Web project’s methodology is to search for material with extremist or terrorist style language (but please read the paper for a better description of methodology). Interestingly, they concluded that sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which have been big components of the Web 2.0 milieu are not suited to the propagation of extremist views,

“We did not consider social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, although they are a major component of Web 2.0. Based on our preliminary exploration, we found that the prevalent amount of personal data on these sites, the tight social linkages, and the potential issue of “guilt by association” (for site owners and “friends”) may have discouraged extremists from using such a medium.“

With regard to virtual worlds the Dark Web project found nuanced evidence of extremist ‘activity’ within Second Life, by using Second Life’s internal search system to look for text containing extremist language. More than anything this highlights the difficultly in researching extremist movements within virtual worlds as the worlds themselves do not easily allow themselves to be searched or data-mined in this fashion. The issue of search within virtual worlds has been grappled with by a number of commentators, the problem being what to search for, people, content, land, buildings, events, etc. But more importantly language used within virtual worlds doesn’t hold the same meaning when pulled out of its in-world context. For example the dark-web project cites a number of groups it discovered in Second Life using extremist language, one of who (Terrorists of SL) has a small virtual headquarters called ‘Taliban Towers’. An examination of this site and associated group would tend to suggest they are a role-playing collective with little real-world application. The same goes for other in-world organizations such as, Elite Jihadi Terrorist group.

Therefore, what this research does is point to something fundamental about how global intelligence and law-enforcement agencies need to approach the examination of virtual worlds, and that is that raw data-crunching is likely to prove unsatisfactory. Ironically, virtual worlds require a uniquely human approach. The only sure way to gather information on extremist or criminal groups operating in virtual worlds is to enter the environment and interact with the suspected groups. The United States Intelligence community is not short of computing power but what this new environment needs is the human touch or to put it in the language of the Beltway — layer Virtual-HUMINT over the SIGINT mission.

Good piece in the FT by David Wortley on business use of 3-D worlds. He specifically mentions the need for enhanced security as a prerequisite for wider adoption of virtual environments by business,

“For commercial operations to settle with confidence into virtual worlds, far more work is going to be needed on security. It is virtually impossible to find out the real identity of people behind the avatars - meaning they have no responsibility for what they do.

Web visitors to company sites are similarly anonymous, but they do not have the same opportunity to abuse staff, band together to organise protest raids, or generally upset other visitors.

Some form of digital signature will be needed to ensure avatars are held to account for their actions, just as they would be in the real world.

In many ways, the growth of virtual worlds is like the frontier towns of the Wild West, where new social forms were worked out messily and in public. In the same way, new codes of behaviour will eventually be adopted.”

Yesterday saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV accompanied as usual by howls of protest from certain quarters of the media about declining moral standards. For the uninitiated Grand Theft Auto is a video game where the player takes on the guise of a criminal character in Liberty city, which is modeled to look like New York City. Whatever the protests the game is set to break opening week sales figures of over $400M, arguably making video games the most dominant of all media forms. This fact, rather than the predictable tut-tutting of assorted commentators is a trend, which is worth examining from a security and intelligence perspective.

There are a number of ideas flying around at the moment that don’t fall under a single banner but which taken as a whole can be thought of as suggesting a new way of considering terrorism or counter-terrorism, particularly through the lens of gaming and other immersive environments. The two categories that roughly coalesce are the application of gaming logic to real-life scenarios and the projects that have emerged from the ‘human terrain mapping’ initiated by the Pentagon. Putting these two modules together allows for a peek over the horizon at what might be next.

There is little doubt that gaming culture is becoming a powerful and pervasive part of society, especially the compelling nature of Massive Multiplayer games. The way these games are designed– the intricate procedural architecture of earning points for completing certain tasks in certain ways, is a template that can be applied to real-life; especially if one were to overlay a gaming template onto real-life activities. One group that has been active in this realm is 42 Entertainment that produce Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) in order to market products. The first such ARG was tied to the Steven Spielberg movie, ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’ and was developed by Jordan Weisman, then a Microsoft executive before he founded 42 Entertainment. The ‘AI’ game involved millions of people across the planet collectively solving a series of puzzles both online and in the real world and became known as ‘the Beast‘. ARG game tasks are too complicated for any one person but the Internet allows for a collective intelligence to emerge and assemble the pieces and solve the puzzles.

Two authors have recently expertly explored these themes in two quite stunning books. The first and most far-reaching is Daemon by Leniad Zeraus (Daniel Suarez). The book explores the overlaying of a gaming system onto real-life by a deceased computer game designer. This book is as intellectually expansive as Snow Crash, which is widely credited with inspiring today’s virtual worlds. The books suggestion of a world controlled by techniques directly adapted from gaming procedures is provocative and compelling. The second and more focused book is Halting State by Charles Stross, which explores a robbery at a virtual bank and again the overlaying of gaming architecture onto real-life. This theme of applying gaming logic over real life doesn’t as yet have a snappy title, although ARG comes close (perhaps Daemon is better though). Whatever you call the system it does rely, at heart, on the fact that human behavior is becoming more predictable through the collection of data about our online lives. What is remarkable at The Daemon is how much the novel relies on human social engineering as well as advanced software to make its case.

The data being collected on users by technology companies, ISP’s and a host of other entities allows for the creation of models that with a built in level of error can somewhat predict future human behavior. One such researcher in this area is Paul Torrens who has programmed avatars to replicate certain human physical behaviors, and then by placing them in crowd situations predications can be made on the direction of the crowd. This is the fruit of the human terrain mapping projects coming out of DARPA. Nobody is quite clear as yet what the models can be used for other than obvious areas such as, the design of buildings or crowd control but this research could be combined with the gaming architectures to produce real-life gaming parameters where human responses are predictable within a range of options.

By now you may be wondering what has this all got to do with national security? Well these systems may be very good ways of organizing distributed groups to complete complex tasks — for good or ill. The first advantage is the built in level of security as participants would not be required to know who else was involved in the wider platform or what the end result was supposed to be. The best way to highlight this is to think about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in gaming terms. By considering the desired end result the terrorist-designer of the real-life game could work backwards to gather the necessary resources and skills. Entry level gamers would (in real life) score points for learning English, becoming familiar with airport security (again tested online), radicalization (their zeal could be ranked using online quizzes and interviews and scored accordingly) and of course their capability on flight simulator software. This ‘game’ could be offered to numerous people without any of them being aware of what the purpose was. Those who score the highest could be sent the actual funds to carryout the operation. This is of course looking backwards an ARG (or Daemon) system such as this could be constructed by any radical or even mainstream organization in order to develop recruits or conduct a wide variety of distributed small tasks that collectively add-up to a significant whole. What works for one side also works for the other. Intelligence agencies around the world are currently asking themselves what their response should be to virtual worlds and gaming in general. One answer is certainly to adapt the underlying systems of these games to conduct some national security functions - training agents and organizing individuals to act as part of a massively distributed project are two such possibilities. Drawing the larger lessons from gaming architecture is the strategic response to rise of gaming and virtual worlds.

The adoption of gaming culture and platforms into real-life is a realistic scenario and one with potential benefits as well as pitfalls. The lesson from Grand Theft Auto IV’s expected success isn’t that we should be worried about declining moral standards, it is that gaming culture is now pervasive and as with all technology innovations it can be adapted by anyone for fair means or foul.

Also posted over at the Counter-Terrorism Blog.

Apparently the Chinese virtual world HiPiHi has opened for public beta.

Clearly a significant shift in the world of virtual worlds!

Interesting profile — in which he discusses Second Life’s economy and the challenge of law enforcement (or not) in a globalized virtual word operating across legal jurisdictions. Worth a read:

Link here.

Announcement of new Linden Lab CEO, Mark Kingdon here.