...or, the importance of foiling the traffic analysis.
---------------------------- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993550
By looking for patterns in email traffic, a new technique can quickly identify online communities and the key people in them. The approach could mean terrorists or criminal gangs give themselves away, even if they are communicating in code or only discussing the weather.
"If the CIA or another intelligence agency has a lot of intercepted email
from people suspected of being part of a criminal network, they could use
the technique to figure out who the leaders of the network might be,"
says Joshua Tyler of Hewlett-Packard's labs in Palo Alto, California. At
the very least, it would help them prioritise investigations, he says.
Tyler and his colleagues Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman, study
email communication patterns and communities among networks of people. The
trio wondered if they could identify distinct communities within
Hewlett-Packard's research lab simply by analysing the IT manager's log of
nearly 200,000 internal emails sent by 485 employees over a couple of
months.
This was talked about at least 7-9 years ago. Affinity groups, clusters, etc. I remember this being discussed here on the list, in terms of CIA plots of affinity groups. Also, rumor tracing (figuring out where initial statements emanate from, partly by pattern analysis and causal graphs).
The math was basically done 60 or 80 years ago: Ramsey theory. Wedding party problems (who knows whom at parties, how many can't know N other people, etc.) Graphs, partitions, combinatorics. The stuff Paul Erdos used his amphetamines to drive.
I expect the news releases now are just part of the usual pattern of recycling old results to glom on to research dollars.
--Tim May
--Tim May
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
--Tim May
(.sig for Everything list background)
Corralitos, CA. Born in 1951. Retired from Intel in 1986.
Current main interest: category and topos theory, math, quantum reality, cosmology.
Background: physics, Intel, crypto, Cypherpunks
