[HN Gopher] DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering...
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DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense
program (2017)
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-02-05 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.highergov.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.highergov.com)
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| 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.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| 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.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| AI/ML is a solution, not a problem.
|
| DARPA's mission is to define the problem space, not the
| solution space.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| YES! I should add that they should be thinking about
| intelligence generally, not AI/ML.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > 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.
| mometsi wrote:
| > Name something in the AI/ML space that came out of DARPA in
| the last 15 years.
|
| Well, Caffe immediately comes to mind. It made it easy to
| reproduce, benchmark, and iterate on all kinds of GPU
| accelerated deep learning architectures, and a lot of PyTorch's
| popularity was helped by emphasizing compatibility to make it
| the successor to PyCaffe.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Guy walks into federal office, claims to be in charge, starts
| plugging in his PC, demands authorization. "Social engineering"
| or nah?
| kevcampb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess he has to ask twitter because he doesn't actually have
| clearance to ask someone who would know
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The grant is for "proposals in the area of automated
| defense against social engineering attacks."
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Would you be willing to expand on that definition?
|
| Are you referring to this part[1]?
|
| https://www.highergov.com/document/hr001117s0050-amendmen
| t-0...
| snypher wrote:
| Maybe you missed the 'defence' part?
| Lammy wrote:
| That's defense of the government apparatus in the same
| sense as "Continuity Of Government" -- not defense of
| constituents themselves.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Friend, I accept that there is a level of snark, when it
| comes to this stuff, but even rudimentary check of the
| website in question[1] will tell you that there are two
| pieces to this program:
|
| - ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) - LARGE SCALE
| SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)
|
| I presume you are being snarky about ASED. I was thinking
| about the other one.
|
| https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA865018C7886_
| 970...
| netbioserror wrote:
| Was the Patriot Act patriotic?
| netbioserror wrote:
| Context provided by the vaunted journalists at Politico,
| I'm sure.
| kevcampb wrote:
| 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.
| excalibur wrote:
| It's literally an attempt to protect Americans against you,
| Elon.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| In case you didn't click through to the the pdf with details
| (https://www.highergov.com/document/hr001117s0050-amendment-0...)
|
| This program is basically asking for an AI interposer between
| your employees and external communication. It wants the AI
| interposer to determine if an interaction is likely to be a
| social engineering attack, and if necessary to be able to
| interact with the external party (potentially up to granting
| access to pre-allocated "burner" resources) to gain additional
| information (either to confirm adversary status, or gather
| intelligence for further action).
|
| It envisions some cute scenarios like somehow maybe there's an
| series of attack coming from a specific source, perhaps the
| system could determine that there is a single attack source, and
| then employ various interaction strategies to try to degrade the
| source's ability to act.
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