Do you trust NSA chief Clapper?
Now for the irony
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James Clapper, announced a “challenge contest” to help those in the intelligence community better understand “human interactions that involve trust and trustworthiness.”
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which describes itself as an agency, “invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide the United States with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.” The challenge that has been approved and involves monetary rewards for winners is called “INSTINCT” or the Investigating Novel Techniques to Identify Neurophysiological Correlates of Trustworthiness challenge. It is a part of IARPA’s TRUST or Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness program, which “seeks to significantly advance the IC’s capabilities to assess whom can be trusted under certain conditions and in contexts relevant to the [intelligence community], potentially even in the presence of stress and/or deception.”
The challenge is described in a posting on Innocentive. It is like something a protagonist in a dystopian story might be told before being pulled further into the darkness of some secret society:
Whom do you trust? Why do you trust them? How do you know whether to trust someone you’ve just met? The answers to these questions are essential in everyday interactions but particularly so in the Intelligence Community, where knowing whom to trust is often vital. The Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) TRUST program seeks ways to detect one’s own neural, psychological, physiological, and behavioral signals that reflect a partner’s trustworthiness. The goal of this Challenge is to develop an algorithm that identifies and extracts such signals from data recorded while volunteers engaged in various types of trust activities. Cross-disciplinary teaming is encouraged in order to bring together expertise from diverse fields (such as neurophysiology and data analytics) to solve this complex problem.
Innocentive, by the way, describes itself as a “global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems to the world’s smartest people who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific, and technical challenges.” They have partnered with “AARP Foundation, Air Force Research Labs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cleveland Clinic, Eli Lilly & Company, EMC Corporation, NASA, Nature Publishing Group, Procter & Gamble, Scientific American, Syngenta, The Economist, Thomson Reuters, and several government agencies in the US and Europe” and claim to have “rapidly” generated “innovative new ideas” to “solve problems faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk than ever before.”
The goal of this challenge to “develop capabilities to detect, measure, and validate one’s own “useful” signals in order to more accurately assess another’s trustworthiness in a particular context,” according to IARPA. And this challenge builds off prior research:
In a series of recent research studies funded by IARPA, voluntary participants interacted with other volunteers while undertaking a number of tasks that required each of them to assess the other’s trustworthiness. In turn, each participant had to decide whether they would act in a trustworthy fashion towards their partner. Importantly, both participants could gain or lose stakes based on the combined consequences of each person’s willingness to trust and each person’s willingness and ability to keep specific promises made to the other. Neural, psychological, and physiological data were collected in parallel with these tasks, with participants’ behavior serving as ground truth (i.e., partners did or did not keep their promises). The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has conducted preliminary analyses of these data, and now joins IARPA in inviting Solvers to explore the data in greater depth.
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/author/kgosztola/
Whack a mole.... sounds like a fun place to work.
And NO..... I don't trust Clapper's lying lies.
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