The government's ability to balance the privacy concerns of lawful U.S. citizens with effective monitoring of potential terrorists has proven an increasingly difficult task, particularly in recent months. But a landmark software development by researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science may ease some of these privacy concerns by making the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient, and more targeted, than ever before.
UCLA Engineering professor Rafail Ostrovsky and graduate researcher William Skeith have developed a new method to mine potential terrorist-related communications that essentially narrows down the data to only those documents that fit pre-set, secret criteria chosen by intelligence agencies. The new approach filters down the information from billions of communications to just those deemed essential — discarding communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community. That means lawful U.S. citizens who don't fit the parameters are automatically ruled out.
The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding — it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user.
Because the code cannot be analyzed, terrorists using the Internet to communicate will never know if the filter has pinpointed their data or not. For those seeking to thwart terrorism, this development means less data to store and wade through in a secure setting, and, ultimately, the ability to react more quickly, without fear of exposing top-secret search criteria and tipping off the terrorists.
Revolutionary Software to Target Suspicious Communications Online
