DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017)
81 comments
·February 5, 2025suraci
first, i need to post the classic joke again...
> A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
then, based on all the defenses and copes for this contract (and USAID) that I have seen here, I take back the conclusion that I naively drew earlier:
> Americans are heavily misled by propaganda.
No, Americans are not misled by propaganda, Americans are participating in the propaganda
such a great work, so much to learn
user32489318
> such a great work, so much to learn
Is this doge meme in a political setting?
rtkwe
No, at least unlikely imo, this is written as a stereotype of how Russians (and people who's first language was related to Russian) often speak in English at first because of the grammar differences between the two languages.
suraci
that's interesting since i said that with my grammatical habits of chinese, or, Chinglish
but I didn't know why it looks like Russify English, can you explain more?
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kevcampb
For context, this is likely related to an Elon Musk tweet earlier today https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887185381797343504 quoting Ian Miles Cheong
> Can someone explain to me why the Department of Defense provided $9,147,532.00 to Reuters for "ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)"
jazzyjackson
I guess he has to ask twitter because he doesn't actually have clearance to ask someone who would know
yieldcrv
Narrator: he has clearance
Elon is aiming to inflame and rage bait by providing insight into what the government authorizes payments for, without context
Its working
kevcampb
If you read the proposal, this is for providing automated defences against social engineering attacks - eg: phishing. It's incredibly benign.
That's not how it's presented on Elon's twitter post, certainly. The replies are just layers and layers of conspiracy theories.
netbioserror
Context provided by the vaunted journalists at Politico, I'm sure.
iugtmkbdfil834
In a very real sense, do you think its appropriate for one's government actively attempt to social engineer the population it is supposed to serve?
jandrewrogers
Even if he doesn't have a clearance (he might because SpaceX), he doesn't need one. Anyone with sufficient authority can read him into any program.
yapyap
My god, he’s actually acknowledging Cheong..
Meatriding has never been this successful
jeffbee
IMC is a known Russian agent, a Malaysian national who openly writes for Putin propaganda outlet RT. Of course he wants to defund American information security.
taurknaut
You can do worse than RT if you watch it knowing you're seeing a curated narrative (which is no different from any paper, really, ours just happen to shill for our own state department). RT is a really good source for eg central asian news, most of which never even gets a mention in western papers.
People really need to stop throwing around "russian agent" if they want the phrase to stay scary. IMC does not need to be tied to Putin to criticize him; he's a moron who's weirdly obsessed with american conservative ragebaiting despite not having anything to do with this country. Like I can't emphasize enough how clearly stupid the man is. (Though it is also very unsurprising that he allegedly supports Putin.)
Other examples: Financial Times is a Japanese paper, so it's not the most reliable at eg reporting on China and Korea. They have surprisingly quality coverage outside of east asia, though, and from my eye they have a lot more matter-of-fact tone to american political coverage than most american papers do. Al Jazeera is not reliable for reporting on Qatar, but they're indispensable for a lot of reporting the west will refuse to engage in around the MENA world (and to a very limited extent, subsaharan africa). Etc etc.
RT has its place; it's no Epoch Times. They have some mildly interesting americans working for them who seem very willing to openly criticize Putin. The russian language version is much more blatantly propaganda.
Edit: well it seems that RT also spreads qanon stuff; I emphatically don't endorse that kind of content, nor did I realize it was there. I stand by the fact that it's a useful tool.
jeffbee
Seems like you went on a whole journey while writing and editing that comment! Downvotes not deserved.
excalibur
It's literally an attempt to protect Americans against you, Elon.
anothercoup
[flagged]
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throwaway-blaze
To be fair, Thomson Reuters is a huge company, with the Reuters news division being only one of the groups within. This may not be anything but a clickbaity title on a grant.
This kerfuffle could be quickly solved if Thomson Reuters published their grant proposal as submitted to and selected by DARPA for this program.
stefantalpalaru
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ipunchghosts
DARPA has a rich history of doing fundamental research but today its largely composed of engineering tasks which for whatever reason arent built by the warfare centers. The days of doing fundamental research are mostly gone in the organization. Name something in the AI/ML space that came out of DARPA in the last 15 years. CNNs- no, deep learning - no, attention - no, LLMs - no, test time training - no.
Its a good engineering org these days building cool things but there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds. The research focused has significantly waned over the last 20 years which is a shame as there are LOTS of fundamental AI/ML problems which no one is studying in industry.
UniverseHacker
> there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds
DARPA chooses real world engineering/technical problems, and then works closely with the external grantees that develop possible solutions, to solve the problem together - rapidly. Fundamental discoveries often come out of that kind of focused well resourced problem solving, but it's not really the goal.
ipunchghosts
That's what ousd is for.
whiplash451
AI/ML is a solution, not a problem.
DARPA’s mission is to define the problem space, not the solution space.
jacobr1
A good example of this was the grand challenge with autonomous vehicles. It spurred all sorts of AI and Robotics related innovation that spun into different directions.
whiplash451
This almost made it to my previous reply, but the DARPA Challenge was 18 years ago.
There might be other ground-breaking challenges that DARPA did since then, I'm just not aware of them.
ipunchghosts
YES! I should add that they should be thinking about intelligence generally, not AI/ML.
mometsi
Edit: Whoops. I incorrectly believed that Caffe was developed with DARPA support. I see DARPA acknowledgments on papers written at BLVC by some of the same authors, but not on Caffe itself.
jeffbee
Guy walks into federal office, claims to be in charge, starts plugging in his PC, demands authorization. "Social engineering" or nah?
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EfficientDude
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metalman
It is only possible to "socialy engineer" people who are genualy unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living, and who are looking for a prompt that will improve there lot. The "solicitation" is absolute proof that the government has failed to provide and support the most basic requirements for a stable society, and is floundering around trying to spin the whole mess, and blame someone else. And 10 mill to one of the major media distributors is on top, of what is realy billions worth of free media coverage for anything the government want to promote. Which means they are panicking.Not that that isnt totaly obvious. They should panic, a lot, because after bieng lied to and cheated for generations now, many ordinary people have come to the reasonable and rational conclusion, that in the face of informational chaos, they can just go ahead and believe ANYTHING, that makes them feel a bit better....for now....and then believe something else later, maybe, or just make stuff up, that they believe, and there friends like, and 27 min latter, its been seen by 37 million others. And they like it, and speak directly to this, and are doing it consiously ,and dont give a rats ass about most of what is happening, and at any moment go bat shit crazy for some new revolutionary type of chewy candy, and since china is the only one who can tool up to make 4 billion dollors of candy overnight, they will get the order, and china will mint another billionair....happens every few days there is no defence
itishappy
> It is only possible to "socially engineer" people who are genuinely unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living...
Brother that's all of us! If anyone here wakes up each morning and goes "yup, this is my lot in life and I wouldn't change a thing" then please share your secret!
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GGByron
Doesn't that seem a bit too complacent? Personally I've always thought the opposite - malcontents have more to gain and less to lose by criticizing or opposing the status quo.
metalman
You would have been right when the ratio of malcontents to those who could say that they enjoyed the benifits of society was 5 or 10 to 1 but tose days are gone, and in many geographic (read postal codes) locations, there is nothing to be contented with or strive for, except at worse than lightnigng strike while winning the lottery odds.
I'm in Vietnam and have a bunch of extended family around. The key is social bonds. Outside of the kids' school/sports/arts they're allowed total freedom. And the variety of play (both on and offline) is astonishing. But the thing that stands out is that a good half of them are curled on a couch or hiding in a corner on their phones...and the parents don't care...because as soon as a parent asks for something to be done, the kid drops everything and jumps to do it.
By having real people around (that love them) they know that everything in the phone is less real.