On Monday 25 July, the Statement of the Day on the Telegraaf website was as follows: “ The Internet must be better monitored ”. The reason was of course the Norwegian drama of the previous Friday. The statement was explained as follows: “The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik was very active on the internet. He kept blogs in which he gave vent to his radical right-wing extremist ideas. Do you think that the government, not only in Norway but also elsewhere in Europe, is sufficiently alert to what is happening on the internet? What do you think? Could the drama have been prevented if more attention had been paid?”
This train of thought has undoubtedly occurred to many more people. Is it possible to prevent these kinds of dramas by (pro)actively keeping an eye on what is happening on the internet? The science fiction film Minority Report (2002) by director Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise, is set in the year 2054. A special PreCrime task force is concerned with preventing crimes. Three clairvoyants lie in a kind of tank, in which they concentrate on future crimes. Police officer Tom Cruise intervenes based on their thoughts to prevent worse. The central theme in the film is the classic debate about free will versus determinism. For the sake of clarity, we can put it as follows: are you allowed to convict someone in advance because he will commit a crime in the future?
The company Recorded Future, funded by Google Ventures and the CIA, kenya phone number list analyzes past and (real-time) present information behavior to predict the future. On the same day that the Oslo attack took place, the company published an interesting blog post, titled “ The Nature of (Pre)News and Event Detection ”. The article opens as follows: “Being able to detect events early, or even before they occur, can carry substantial value, sometimes in the form of significant financial gain, other times in the ability to save lives, or even in providing the opportunity to change the nature of what is to happen.”
In the free trend report “ We The Web: The reconquest of life from the hustle and bustle ” Jaap Bloem and I drew a similar conclusion. “By using knowledge as a force, as a lever by collecting, storing, processing, sharing and exploiting data from all sides” a new period of Enlightenment can be achieved. Predicting and intervening is therefore indeed possible, Jaap and I state. The DIKW+ figure below, see also the article “ Social media enable manipulation of stock prices ” makes this clear. By linking context (and therefore understanding) to data it is possible to use data predictively. Via the path of data, information, knowledge, wisdom and ultimately “enlightenment” we can not only limit risks but also very concretely prevent problems.
Now back to the Telegraaf's Thesis of the Day. Can the Internet be better monitored? The answer to this thesis is "yes". The abundance of data can be used to better predict the future. Alarm bells could have gone off when Anders Behring Breivik posted his only tweet.