Open Source Homeland

We need more of this. All you need is the right language skills, some rudimentary technology, and a desire to make money.

S.C. mom scoops al-Qaida with its videos - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON - Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.

“I realized, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here, I’m a fat 50-year-old mom and I’ve managed to scoop al-Qaida,” said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

The content is there; let’s use it.

nsf.gov - News - Scientists Use the “Dark Web” to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.

This is no small undertaking. The speed, ubiquity, and potential anonymity of Internet media–email, web sites, and Internet forums–make them ideal communication channels for militant groups and terrorist organizations. As a result, terrorists groups and their followers have created a vast presence on the Internet. A recent report estimates that there are more than 5,000 Web sites created and maintained by known international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgencies, and many home-grown terrorist cells in Europe. Many of these sites are produced in multiple languages and can be hidden within innocuous-looking Web sites.

England is a great hotbed of community-oriented action sites that rely on data to make them go. Here’s Fixmystreet:

What is FixMyStreet for?

FixMyStreet is a site to help people report, view, or discuss local problems they’ve found to their local council by simply locating them on a map. It launched in beta early February 2007.

Can you give me some examples?

Sure. Graffiti, unlit lampposts, abandoned beds, broken glass on a cycle path; anything like that that could be usefully reported to your council to be fixed.

How do I use the site?

After entering a postcode or location, you are presented with a map of that area. You can view problems already reported in that area, or report ones of your own simply by clicking on the map at the location of the problem.

How are the problems solved?

They are reported to the relevant council by email. The council can then resolve the problem the way they normally would. Alternatively, you can discuss the problem on the website with others, and then together lobby the council to fix it, or fix it directly yourselves.

Is it free?

The site is free to use, yes. FixMyStreet is run by a registered charity, though, so if you want to make a contribution, please do.

Built by great people who are pushing the limits in what it means to be involved w/o being a whiner:

built by mySociety, in conjunction with the Young Foundation. mySociety is the project of a registered charity which has grown out of the community of volunteers who built sites like TheyWorkForYou.com. mySociety’s primary mission is to build Internet projects which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. Our first project was WriteToThem, where you can write to any of your elected representatives, for free.

Abandoned bicycles - Viewing a problem - FixMyStreet
Reported in the Abandoned Vehicles category by Tom Coady at 16:43, Wednesday

Here’s a fantastic use of human computer labor:

What is reCAPTCHA?
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” OCR. The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Example of OCR errors

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

EFF: DeepLinks

Weve already started scouring newly-released documents relating to the misuse of National Security Letters to collect Americans private information. But dont let us have all fun — you, too, can dive into the docs and help uncover the truth about the FBIs abuse of power. All 1138 pages are freely downloadable with searchable text from EFF’s website, and well be posting a new batch every month.

Weve had over 8000 downloads so far, and the blogosphere is starting to light up with feedback and analysis of the documents, which were disclosed after EFF sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act FOIA earlier this year. Over at Wired, Threat Level reports that much of the mischief at the FBI seems to be emanating from a mysterious “Room 4944”, and this anonymous blogger is asking questions about who knew what when.