From the post:
When local police came calling with child porn allegations last January, former Saint John city councillor Donnie Snook fled his house clutching a laptop. It was clear that the computer contained damning data. Six months later, police have finally gathered enough evidence to land him in jail for a long time to come.
With a case seemingly so cut and dry, why the lag time? Couldn’t the police do a simple search for the incriminating info and level charges ASAP? Easier said than done. With computing devices storing terrabytes of personal data, it can take months before enough evidence can be cobbled together from reams of documents, emails, chat logs and text messages.
That’s all about to change thanks to a new technique developed by researchers at Concordia University, who have slashed the data-crunching time. What once took months now takes minutes.
Gaby Dagher and Benjamin Fung, researchers with the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, will soon publish their findings in Data & Knowledge Engineering. Law enforcement officers are already putting this research to work through Concordia’s partnership with Canada’s National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, in which law enforcement organizations, private companies, and academic institutions work together to share information to stop emerging cyber threats and mitigate existing ones.
Thanks to Dagher and Fung, crime investigators can now extract hidden knowledge from a large volume of text. The researchers’ new methods automatically identify the criminal topics discussed in the textual conversation, show which participants are most active with respect to the identified criminal topics, and then provide a visualization of the social networks among the participants.
Dagher, who is a PhD candidate supervised by Fung, explains “the huge increase in cybercrimes over the past decade boosted demand for special forensic tools that let investigators look for evidence on a suspect’s computer by analyzing stored text. Our new technique allows an investigator to cluster documents by producing overlapping groups, each corresponding to a specific subject defined by the investigator.”
Have you heard about clustering documents? Searching large volumes of text? Producing visualizations of social networks?
The threat of government snooping on its citizens should be evaluated on its demonstrated competence.
The FBI wants special backdoors (like it has for telecommunications) just to monitor IP traffic. (Going Bright… [Hack Shopping Mall?])
It would help the FBI if they had our secret PGP keys.
There a thought, maybe we should all generate new PGP keys and send the secret key for that key to the FBI.
They may not ever intercept any traffic encrypted with those keys but they can get funding from Congress to maintain an archive of them and to run them against all IP traffic.
The NSA probably has better chops when it comes to data collection but identity mining?
Identity mining is something completely different.