EU funding Orwellian artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour” – Telegraph.

The European Union has undertaken a five year research program to develop computer programmes which will be able to profile entire nations. “Project Indect” will use artificial intelligence to build “agents” capable of detecting “abnormal behaviour” on the internet.

Project Indect’s website says 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”.

Project Indect has received nearly £10 million in funding from the British taxpayer, and has many civil liberty groups worried. With Shami Chakrabarti of the human rights group ‘Liberty’ describing such mass surveillance of a country a “sinister step”, but doing so on a European scale “positively chilling”.