[FYI] Email traffic patterns can reveal ringleaders

[Jan Meyer <jan@synflood.in-berlin.de>]

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http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993550

By looking for patterns in email traffic, a new technique can quickly identify
online communities and the key people in them. The approach could mean
terrorists or criminal gangs give themselves away, even if they are
communicating in code or only discussing the weather.

"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," says Joshua
Tyler of Hewlett-Packard's labs in Palo Alto, California. At the very least,
it would help them prioritise investigations, he says.

Tyler and his colleagues Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman, study email
communication patterns and communities among networks of people. The trio
wondered if they could identify distinct communities within Hewlett-Packard's
research lab simply by analysing the IT manager's log of nearly 200,000
internal emails sent by 485 employees over a couple of months.

[...]




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