EU Funding Computer Plan for Finding "Abnormal Behavior"

File this under "uh oh" heading. It appears that the European Union is developing computer programs to monitor private citizens computers to detect potentially violent or abnormal behavior.

From Ian Johnston at the Telegraph (h/t BARCEPUNDIT): "A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as 'agents' to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

"Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence'.

"Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

"Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a 'sinister step' for any country, adding that it was 'positively chilling' on a European scale."

[...]

"Miss Chakrabarti said: 'Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

"'It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.'

"According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include 'to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence'.

"It talks of the 'construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive'.

"York University's computer science department website details how its task is to develop 'computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web'.

"'Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis,' it says."

Great...