Briefs

New Scientist (03/27/03); Muir, Hazel

Hewlett-Packard researchers have devised a new method of analyzing the flow of email traffic for patterns that could reveal online communities and their leaders, and HP's Joshua Tyler says law enforcement officials could employ the technique to sniff out terrorists and other online criminals. The scientists used HP's research lab as a testbed, and were able to scope out various communities by mapping out connections between staff who had exchanged at least 30 emails with each other, while a computer algorithm searched for crucial links between separate groups. By comparing the members of each community with the company organization charts, the researchers discovered that 49 of the 66 outlined groups had members who all worked in the same department, while most of the remaining groups were organized around collaborative projects. In another test, the scientists plotted out the emails with an algorithm that attempts to frame the network with as few entanglements as possible. Tyler says the plot placed persons with the widest range of organizational contacts, usually the managers, in the center. "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," he explains. Tyler acknowledges that privacy could become an issue, given how information is gathered and used.

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