Crowd Sourced Intelligence Agency

The ‘Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency’ (CSIA) is an online application and interactive artwork that addresses the overabundance of information currently being produced by social media posts and monitored by intelligence analysts. The “collect it all” approach of these intelligence agencies has created a need for automated processing, assuming that software will find patterns imperceptible to human analysts. Computers running machine-learning algorithms can automate judgment, labeling tens of thousands of posts per second. But if there are problems with the way an algorithm is trained, mistakes will be replicated. If human agents are not trained to properly analyze social media posts for threats to national security, how could an algorithm possibly perform any better?

Anne De Boer