From the Washington Post:
The Secret Service is looking to buy software that can spot sarcasm on social media…
But getting a computer to detect sarcasm and its linguistic complexities can be difficult — and some experts worry at the prospect of attempts to parse speech by a government agency that has the power to arrest people for posting alleged threats online…
The Secret Service request for the software, first reported by nextgov.com, was posted Monday. The agency is accepting proposals until next Monday.
The work order asks for a long list of specific tools, including the ability to identify influential figures on social media, analyze data streams in real time, access old Twitter data and use heat maps. (It also wants the software to be compatible with the five-year-old Internet Explorer 8 browser — a sign of the government’s outdated technology.)
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said the request will allow the agency to create its own system for monitoring Twitter — both its own presence in social-media and important issues that are trending on the social network. Detecting sarcasm is just a small feature of the effort, he said…
“There is a reason why they want to do this,” Eckersley said. “There have been regular, tragically documented instances where a human being whose crime is being too funny winds up with a pile of agents pointing guns at them and arresting them because they made a joke.”…
I am reminded of a old cartoon where a saleman being lynched by a mob of engineers asks, “How hard can it be to make a copy machine that also flies?”
And when the SecServ’s snooper-software goes online, Dylan Breves will be renditioned to a Supermax. From the New Yorker :
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. He and his brother had spotted several coatis while on a trip to the Iguaçu Falls, in Brazil, where they had mistaken them for actual aardvarks…
Adding a private gag to a public Wikipedia page is the kind of minor vandalism that regularly takes place on the crowdsourced Web site. When Breves made the change, he assumed that someone would catch the lack of citation and flag his edit for removal.
Over time, though, something strange happened: the nickname caught on. About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase “Brazilian aardvark.” Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called “Brazilian aardvark” have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for “Brazilian aardvark” will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian aardvark still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence…
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Apart from reinforcing our belief that the internets are just about as weird as we imagined — and yet still weirder than we can imagine — what’s on the agenda for the evening?