Briefs

Christopher Dela Cruz and Megan Carr, 2/21/07

The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.

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One of the ideal results would be for Homeland Security officials to be able to "find a suspicious group based on its pre-event communication activity before they act," according to a PowerPoint presentation used by researchers to explain the project.

Nicholas Belkin, a University professor who studied in the field of Information Retrieval Systems, said these techniques have the potential for abuse if they fall into the wrong hands.

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