DARPA Calling for AI Proposals to Measure How Authoritarian Regimes Control Information

From Next Gov.com (June 2):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for innovative research concepts that can help foster an understanding of how authoritarian regimes control information.

For authoritarian regimes, maintaining control of information has always been imperative. But digital technologies are providing nations such as China—infamous for the surveillance of its own citizens—new tools for censorship.

DARPA, under a program called Measuring the Information Control Environment, or MICE, wants to develop artificial intelligence technology to “measure how digitally authoritarian regimes repress their populations at scale over the internet via censorship, blocking, or throttling,” according to a June 1 post on SAM.gov.

“MICE-developed technology will continuously and automatically update and feed into easily-understood dashboards in order to develop comprehensive, real-time ground truth understanding of how countries conduct domestic information control,” the post reads. [read more]

Interesting. Well, they could find people who escaped from N. Korea, China and Cuba and talk to them. Maybe read the novel 1984 by George Orwell. Talk to Gordan Change and Michael Pillsbury. They’re experts on China. They also wrote books on China too.