From critical infrastructures to the intelligence of the future.

Introduction.

In my latest installment of my column “Intelligence delle cose”, we left off with the concept of “intelligence of the future” as the “understanding of data, as a study of the computerization of sources” and the importance of interconnected networks. We highlighted the need for a social approach to new technologies, as well as a scientific and computerized one, and the importance of monitoring the spread of information, as well as human relationships, for managing the “unpredictable” (https://affidaty.io/blog/it/2021/02/teoria-delle-reti/).

Networks and data control.

Let’s start with the concept of unpredictability or unpredictability of things.

Our society is increasingly invaded by profiling, data that fluctuates and controls us. This control comes primarily from images: we use emoticons to express our feelings, infographics to summarize key concepts with images and little text. Even social networks are giving more and more space to images and less to words, just think of the recent success of Instagram and TikTok, which thrive on images, to the detriment of Facebook, for example.

Anyone can have their life, through their images, controlled by anyone else on social networks. This is where Lyon’s analysis comes in, which says a lot with just the title of his work “The Culture of Surveillance. How the Control Society Has Made Us All Controllers”. In the past, control was vertical because it took place through a totalitarian state or secret police, today it is horizontal, that is, we ourselves monitor society and ensure that others do so on us, we observe and control each other.

From PageRank to its evolution in social sorting.

With the expansion of new technologies, this monitoring has degenerated somewhat. In fact, with the simple smartphone that everyone now owns, from checking the lives of others by “scrolling” through the social network homepage, we are becoming “immortalizers” of infractions or even crimes, denouncing our neighbor or the simple on those same homepages.

But how did we get to this point? To begin with, remember that data monitoring started with an algorithm created in 1998, called PageRank, to put together and hypertextually connect the pages searched in search engines, assigning a value of importance and reliability of content to each of them.

This selection and categorization mechanism is already expressed in the name: “rank” means ranking and stands for the classification of sites, “page” means page, but partly also comes from the name of its creator, who is called Larry Page. Page and his research partner Sergey Brin, in 1996, within the “Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project” (SIDLP) project, created the first formula on a new type of search engine called BackRub, which then is the original name of Google, in which the algorithm classified pages based on the number of “backlinks” of a page, the links that pointed to a website, in order to create a universal digital library. From there, the idea of ​​creating order based on the “link popularity” of information, therefore the popularity of links, considering not only the incoming links to electronic documents but also the value of the PageRank of the pages from which they start.

Along with Page and Brin, Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg also contributed to the development of Google, while Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd wrote the first document with them, published in 1998, which describes PageRank and Google’s initial prototype. From there, Page and Brin founded the company Google Inc. and filed the patent for PageRank. Despite being a Google trademark, the patent was assigned to Stanford University, with exclusive licensing rights granted to Google in exchange for 1.8 million shares that the university then sold in 2005 for $336 million.

How did PageRank then evolve into what we now call “social sorting”? From David Lyon’s culture of surveillance, this concept refers to the categorization of raw data related to a group of people, which can be based on race, gender, occupational status, social status, etc., into various segments by data manipulators and brokers. These brokers, based on their goals, collect raw data and make it functional for a specific purpose. In this way, trends are created and predictions are promoted. We also find this social sorting in the past, just think of the gender division between men and women in the workplace or the ethnic division between white and black for master-slave.

The unpredictable and intelligence.

When we talk about the unpredictability of things, we refer to everything around us, from economic to health crises, from terrorist attacks to cyber attacks. Monitoring information and networks also plays a crucial role in preventing a more or less catastrophic event, and Intelligence agencies could play a crucial role in the future.

“Intelligence is the tool that the State uses to collect, keep and disseminate to interested parties, whether public or private, information relevant to the protection of the security of Institutions, citizens and businesses.” Intelligence, from the Latin inter-legere, is to read between the lines, to understand first.

From the pandemic to cyber attacks to chemical attacks, “a new socio-technological era that emerges as technologies merge with each other and humans with these, two processes that occur simultaneously. The exponentially growing power of information technology (IT) pushes other fields of science at an accelerated pace, allowing them to exceed their respective limits in terms of scope and speed.” [Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna.

Hybrid Age, “The power of technology in global competition”, 2013 Codice edizioni, Turin]. What should be done and how should services around the world be organized to prevent, for example, a pandemic? First of all, data should be collected on a base of confirmed cases (syndromic phase), then data should be collected on cases of people movements and habits. In a network of relationships, a database is built in which data on movements and drug purchases are collected.

These data should then be cross-referenced with the presence or absence of people at work. Evaluate the reason and map, in respect of privacy, the movements for the public good. Make a general mapping, consider the most affected geographic areas, and understand the spread and movements. The latter could be mapped by crossing data on car movements, toll payments, traffic flow from authorized roadside cameras and cross-referencing with variable transport ticket purchase data (trains, planes, ships, etc.). These should also be attributed with indicators and data collected on possible dangers of mafia infiltrations, to prevent social problems from being added to a medical problem, ecological and environmental mapping to verify air quality and weather.

Osint and humint for prevention.

Sticking with the example of the pandemic as a crisis, after the issue of the easy spread of fake news that has arisen in the last year, we can even more confidently assert that social media and the web must be constantly monitored, and this activity must be accompanied by Osint (Open Source Intelligence, collection of information from open and public sources) analysis on the dark web and deep web, and humint (Human Intelligence, collection of information through interpersonal contacts) analysis. Humint serves to reveal the reliability of the data entered into systems, such as AI and technological platforms.

Open Source Intelligence analyzes open sources, such as mass media, social media, publicly released government information, information released by common citizens, academic and scientific material. It is important to emphasize that open sources are not offered, but, unlike what many believe, are only freely accessible to those who are able to retrieve them. On the other hand, there is an Osint that now applies transversely even with hackers, on the dark web and the deep web. Obviously, this technique may involve paid services on behalf of more or less structured relationships with large information groups such as multinationals linked to both social media and online research.

Human Intelligence involves agents who interact and work directly with human sources, resorting to open sources and informants. The most common Humint activities are, for example, ordinary patrols, special reconnaissance, information resulting from the work of embassy military advisors, drafting diplomatic reports, confessions of prisoners of war, interviews with refugees and travelers, and news provided by non-governmental organizations, up to actual spying operations.