Newly-Discovered DHS Project ‘Night Fury’ Attempted to Assign ‘Risk Scores’ to Social Media Accounts

Newly-disclosed documents reveal the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to develop a project that assigns “risk scores” on social media.

The project, which began in 2018, is called “Night Fury.”

The Brennan Center for Justice obtained the documents under a public records request and shared them with Motherboard, who first reported on them.

“The work at UAB will be initially focused on counter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding/characterizing/identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities, including the study of bot detection,” the documents state.

“However, successful methods should scale to other DHS domains. The intent is also to understand how threats evolve over time to lesser social media communities,” it added.

While everyone was piling on @PeterHotez, new docs surfaced from a project between the DHS and the University of Alabama dubbed #NightFury to analyze and assign "risk scores" to social media user accounts involved in "disinformation campaigns."

Social credit scores are coming. pic.twitter.com/i2xIOZs4Aa

— Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) June 19, 2023

“The University of Alabama at Birmingham and DHS planned to work together to ‘identify relevant attributes’ that would identify Facebook accounts and groups as being “pro-terrorist” by ranking them or assigning them a ‘Risk Score,'” the Brennan Center for Justice wrote.

“DHS materials about a project that sought to ‘identify potential terrorism risks’ online highlight ongoing concerns about government misuse of social media,” the nonprofit added.

Motherboard reports:

“The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts. The Contractor shall develop tools to automate the identification process, documenting performance measures and metrics related to automating the identification process,” one of the documents reads. DHS said it stopped work on the project in 2019.

Project Night Fury intended to use Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide “cross-mission operational context,” Motherboard noted.

A red flag that should frighten anyone who values liberty is the program would likely display biases on who’s considered ‘pro-terrorist.’

The program could easily be weaponized against the American people.

If you post the ‘wrong’ thoughts on social media, you could obtain a “risk score” and be deemed a threat.

Cont. from Motherboard:

“The use of automated processes to analyze social media to determine the likelihood that someone is ‘pro-terrorist’ and to assign a ‘risk score’ to individuals and groups online has echoes of a discredited Trump administration proposal called the Extreme Vetting Initiative, which would have monitored social media and the rest of the open internet to automatically flag people for deportation or visa denial based on whether they would be a ‘positively contributing member of society’ or ‘contribute to the national interests,’ as well as whether they ‘intend to commit’ a crime or act of terrorism,’ Rachel Levinson-Waldman, Managing Director, Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Motherboard in an email.

“As a number of experts in machine learning and automated decision-making told DHS less than a year before the Night Fury contract was signed, attempting to make automated judgments about these matters is both impossible and likely to be infected with bias, as these characteristics have no concrete definition, much as there is no definition of being ‘pro-terrorist,’” she added.

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The Brennan Center for Justice, who obtained the documents, shared further info:

What little information is publicly available about Night Fury was revealed in a DHS Inspector General report released on March 7, 2022. The inspector general’s investigation began after the office received a tip regarding potential privacy violations pertaining to Night Fury, which began in September 2018 and cost almost $790,000. According to the inspector general’s report, the Office of Science and Engineering aimed to use Night Fury to develop capabilities to “identify potential terrorism risks” on social media and other open-source platforms. As part of the project, the office contracted with a university (now revealed to be the University of Alabama at Birmingham) to collect social media data. The complaint to the inspector general alleged that the project “specifically included data collection of millions of social media records, including posts, videos, and photos.” Though the report does not provide additional information about Night Fury, it found that the Science and Technology Directorate did not consistently comply with guidelines and policies governing privacy and sensitive information requirements in its research and development projects.

In response to our request, DHS produced two contracts with the University of Alabama at Birmingham: an initial contract dated September 21, 2018, and an extension from August 27, 2019, through December 23, 2021. Though the cost is redacted, the government’s public contracting website reveals that they totaled almost $790,000. DHS also produced three versions of the privacy threshold analysis for the project, though none is dated, and it is unclear which is the final version. DHS staff conduct privacy threshold analyses to determine how a new or expanded program or system could impact privacy; the DHS Privacy Office then reviews the analysis to determine if further compliance documentation is required. None of the analyses that were produced included comments from the Privacy Office, though the inspector general’s report indicates that the office received it.

According to the contracts we obtained, the primary purpose of Night Fury was to develop new methods to automatically analyze information from social media to expand DHS’s existing capabilities. Though the project primarily focused on detecting networks of “pro-terrorist” accounts and groups online, DHS also contemplated expanding the scope of the project to include drug trafficking, human smuggling, and other topics. According to one of the privacy analyses, DHS envisioned that the capabilities developed through Night Fury would mature over three incremental phases from September 2018 to September 2021, ultimately aiming to deploy them within the department or commercialize them. However, it appears DHS shuttered the project in 2020 without producing a final research product.

Night Fury’s tasks fall into three main categories. The first involved identifying and tracking “terrorist propaganda” and “pro-terrorist” accounts on Facebook, Twitter, online forums, and “lesser social media communities” like Telegram and VK (Russia’s main social media platform) based on undefined criteria. The University of Alabama at Birmingham and DHS planned to work together to “identify relevant attributes” that would identify Facebook accounts and groups as being “pro-terrorist” by ranking them or assigning them a “Risk Score.” The university also agreed to develop methods to decide whether a Twitter account that was “linked to a confirmed pro-terrorist social media account” should itself be considered pro-terrorist, using criteria such as “keyword set comparisons.” These tasks would be completely automated, with the evident goal of minimizing any human intervention — despite research demonstrating the limitations of algorithmic analysis of social media content. Over the course of the project, the university would compile a list of accounts it identified on Facebook and Twitter, along with their postings and other related data, and provide the data to DHS. The contracts also directed the university to build models to “identify key influencers of pro-terrorist thought” whose messages spread across different forums and social media platforms.