DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017)
29 comments
·February 5, 2025null
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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)"
yapyap
My god, he’s actually acknowledging Cheong..
Meatriding has never been this successful
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.
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?
netbioserror
Context provided by the vaunted journalists at Politico, I'm sure.
excalibur
It's literally an attempt to protect Americans against you, Elon.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
ipunchghosts
YES! I should add that they should be thinking about intelligence generally, not AI/ML.
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.
jeffbee
Guy walks into federal office, claims to be in charge, starts plugging in his PC, demands authorization. "Social engineering" or nah?
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.