more on Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

moraal; NEVER let PR folk at research papers or at least read the  
damn PE before you approve the relase.

Dave

Begin forwarded message:

From: Peter Capek <capek () ieee org>
Date: January 25, 2006 3:40:04 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and  
security?

There's a paper and set of charts describing this work available at

     http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/index.html

Perhaps we can get one of the authors to elucidate this work.   But I  
found
the charts to be fairly clear.  This work addresses the problem that  
the criteria
used (all that's addressed is the presence of specific words) to find  
textual
communication "of interest" are classified.   Today, this  
necessitates gathering into
a secure and classified environment ALL communication of interest,  
which has
scaling, cost, reliability and perhaps other problems.   The question  
the authors
address is how to produce a program which can be used in a non-secure
environment to scan text, and produce an encrypted version of  
interesting
messages, which is then decrypted in a secure environment.  (Think  
hashing
and public key encryption.)  The point is that it's not possible to  
tell, from
the scanning program, which words caused a document to be interesting.
I'm sure I've oversimplified this, but I think I have it essentially  
correct.

It's really misleading to call it "anti-terrorism" software.  And at  
this point,
according to the charts at least, it's not software - only an  
approach and
some theorems.

Lastly, the article cited earlier is misleading in that it says the  
technique
"[discards] communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever
reach the intelligence community."   This approach knows nothing about
whether the people sending or receiving mail are law-abiding, or even  
whether
they're citizens.  Its operation is based solely on the presence of  
specific words
in the message text, although I suppose some of those words could be  
e-mail
addresses.

             Peter Capek



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