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Data analytics gives law enforcement and intelligence agencies powerful tools that still protect privacy and civil liberties

Researchers have created data mining tools that stop criminals while protecting civil liberties. Credit and Larger Version

December 2, 2008

We've all seen the movies and television shows where police detectives and anti-terrorist teams plug a suspect's name into a computer and receive all the relevant data they need to stop a crime or attack before it happens.

But the reality of law enforcement and intelligence work is not nearly as simple as these Hollywood fantasies appear. In a world that is drowning in data, where everyone from border guards to supermarket checkouts gather personal information, finding the right facts in thousands of disparate databases is no small feat.

For many people, even the possibility of such a search raises concerns that personal privacy and civil liberties could get lost even if the right information is found.

Into this delicate challenge comes DI-HOPE-KD, a suite of knowledge discovery tools developed at Rutgers University under the leadership of William M. Pottenger, a research professor of computer science.

Short for Distributed Interactive Higher-Order Privacy-Enhancing Knowledge Discovery, DI-HOPE-KD can take diverse sources of data, be they databases, news reports, or text documents and find intuitive associations, connections and links between them.

Law enforcement agencies have been doing this type of connect-the-dots work for decades, but it often requires weeks and sometimes months of painstaking formatting and reviewing by human eyes before useful data is discovered.

By looking for higher-order links--links that connect more than two dots--DI-HOPE-KD can do the same job in minutes and sometimes even seconds, saving a great deal of time and producing more useful and accurate information than traditional searches.

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