Slashdot Mirror
The Evil in E-Mail
Frenchy in Ontario writes "An Ontario university researcher is devising ways to help law enforcement agencies better pinpoint likely criminal behavior in e-mails. His theory is that people who are "up to something" are more likely to write differently than people who aren't - either by avoiding using certain words at all that could be flagged for possible criminal context (like "bombed) or to examine patterns that might indicate criminal activity - like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate. There's also an interesting paragraph on why Enron's emails aren't as valuable as you might think for this sort of work."
From TFA:
Super. I'm predicting a whole lot of false positives...especially during the initial phase of this operation...
Also from TFA:
Great...so words like 'bombed' get the email flagged...as well as an absense of the word 'bombed'? So far, Skillicorn's test appears 100% sensitive...too bad it's 0% specific.
Some more from TFA:
OMG! This is the pattern of emails in my company! My whole company is a giant terrorist organization! I had no idea!
But here's the kicker...again with the quoting:
So let me get this straight...if criminals are okay with their criminal activity (like...say...terrorists), they'll 'slip under the radar'??? Great test, Skillicorn...sounds a lot like a standard polygraph test, which experienced criminals can fool at will, while innocent people fail them 50% of the time. That's what the War on Terror really needs...another inaccurate 'test' that does nothing but throw false positives.
I'm just glad that this method is so obviously stupid that it will never be implemented by our government...
Oh, wait...one more from TFA:
Crap.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This may work well for English,etc.. but may not work with other languages..
I had a feeling that my correspondence wasn't invigilated enough.
I'm a terrorist if I avoid using the word "bombed"?
I'd better put "bombed" in my signature.
I love Big Brother! ::tears::
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
The emails you send would be encrypted instead plaintext.
Real criminals aren't dumb, only the bad ones who get caught are.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Don't they just need to grep for >:-) ?
Ok so now that the Slashdot terrorists have read the article*, I guess they all just start to use "bombed" in all their emails to avoid getting flagged...
*: I know they won't really have read TFA, but the summary was all we really needed... as always.
This line in the lead jumped out at me: We have an addresses "techsupport@internaldomain" which matches this pattern to a T.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Back when we were on MS-Windows, it would have been OK, because the people asking for TechSupport were often sending each other worms at the same time.
Pattern recognition has been around a long time - from analyzing the causes of infection to finding likely cheats on expense reports (and the latter uses the frequencies of certain digits, rather than looking for the text entries).
I do disagree with his statement about not being useful to fight spam - recognizing patterns ins spam is already in use, applying the idea that the same or significantly numerous occurrences of the same words from either the same person to multiple users at the same sight and different sites, or the same basic message sent to multiple users from different mailers / return addresses might be a good indicator of spam. The challenge is how do you monitor all the traffic?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Its what you DON'T write that gives you away.
This just in.
Water is wet.
This will be a total BOMB , Honestly this is not a new field of science at-all , Letters and writing have been examined for years and criminals writing E-mails will be writing the same things they always write .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I've sent out dozens of e-mails this past week that didn't contain the word "bombed"! Also, no doubt many people I e-mailed also received e-mail from folks with whom I haven't exchanged e-mail!!!
The knock on my front door ought to be coming any time now...
So it'll be flagging spam as communications from a criminal network. No, wait: "from the mass of emails": that's any message that's not spam is a possible criminal conspiracy!
Actually, spam might work well as the internet equivalent of the shortwave numbers stations: meaningless garbage that actually means something to one specific recipient....
Ah, my alma mater Queen's makes it onto Slashdot!
I don't know if using the Enron e-mails as his test material is such a good idea. Corporate malfeasance is probably not conducted the same way that every other criminal (or terrorist) network runs. At least their communication might be different due not to a "lack of guilt" but due to the fact that it's probably so easy to make a naughty memo sound like an innocent one without being obvious. After all these memos would be mixed in with a lot of legitimate company business the conspirators are also conducting.
How does automated analysis separate a memo saying "I think we should go ahead and promote Price out of the mailroom" - which means "Have Price-Waterhouse cook those spreadsheets I sent you", from one which just leads to some dude getting promoted out of the mailroom? Of course if they are not bothering to use code words then the system might work very well.
A related trick, he says, is to examine patterns in who e-mails whom. As an example, in criminal networks it is common to find several people communicating regularly with the same person, but never with each other. This is meant to ensure that if one lawbreaker is caught, he or she is unlikely to lead authorities to too many others. But it can also be a clue to suspicious activity.
Traffic analysis is probably more promising, since you can reconstruct relationships between players with it. The traffic pattern could look like a terrorist cell, or it could look like a bunch of guys who know each other - as he says, there's a difference. But this is old news, though automating it would make snoops' lives easier.
At any rate I find this line of inquiry disturbing for civil rights reasons, but I don't believe we should attack the researcher for working on it. Academic freedom is a very useful concept and ultimately does us more good than harm, IMO.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I am sure this will prove to as productive as searching eBay images for hidden Al-Qaeda messages.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
That should keep me safe for a few days.
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Personally, I can't see how this would ever work. It is typical of the attitude that "all terrorists are bad, they are all the same and we just have to deal with them all in the same way".
Isn't it obvious that different terrorists will have different styles, different levels of literacy, different levels of security awareness, different languages, different aims, different approaches - the list goes on and on. Normal emails all have these traits too. I can't imagine there is any way of applying Bayesian filtering to help with this task.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Al Queda probably uses GPG or some other form of strong encryption in their e-mails.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
He's just using statistics to detect emails that are "different". So, anyone who isn't conforming is flagged up. Organising an anti-war protest? There you are, flagged. Say goodbye to freedom, if you hadn't already. Or encrypt all your emails, and try and persuade everyone you know to. Maybe we can make encryption widespread enough these things are useless.
I am trolling
...or to examine patterns that might indicate criminal activity - like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
Not to mention most social networks. Or is everyone you know equally popular?
Isn't the word matching part just a bayesian filter?
This solves several national problems. First of all, the millions of false positives generated each day would require hundreds of thousands of federal employees. We could possibly create a whole new administration! This would solve the problem of unemployment in this country, atleast at the skilled level. /sarcasm
This reminds me of a Perl module Text::Gender
or something which I tried out in a few experiments last year. It is supposed to analyse writing and determine whether its author is female or male.
It works rather well given the conditions that the authour is also is American, white and middle class. Any samples outside that field and it fails spectacularly actually getting more wrong than right (worse than chance).
These sort of ideas are cute in their ambitions
but not science of any kind at all. The tests given in the email analysis article are even more wooly still. It sort of annoys me as a scientist that standards have sunk so low and funding is available for hairbrained capers like the one described in the article.
They would encrypt there emails.
Umm, shouldn't his next step be to determine whether these "unusual" e-mails actually indicate criminal activity? Nothing in the article indicates that this has actually been researched at all. In fact, the opposite - he makes excuses about the brazenness of the Enron emails he's using as a data source.
Seems like what we've got here is 1) some researcher's collection of hunches about what unusual email traits might indicate criminal behavior, 2) said researcher's algorithm to find said unusual email traits, but 3) absolutely no effort to test whether the link between his hunches and real criminal behavior are true. This is science?
Indeed. In fact, this number could be as high as 100%. We have no way of knowing otherwise because the researcher is just making assertions, not presenting data, about the most crucial point of his hypothesis.
Umm... where's the beef?
Dr Skillicorn has obviously never done any work with or for a law enforcement or intelligence agency. After spending three years in this area working on data mining of electronic communication, I can say this fella has not done his research properly. He has failed to note that the frequency of grammatical and spelling mistakes, let alone "missing" words, have become so frequent now in the SMS TXT generation that this will cause a major problem when scanning messages on this scale. I really can't be bothered to pick any more holes in this because it is time for a bacon and ketchup sandwich.
Everytime I hear one of these stories about how they can catch criminals from their email messages, I'm like, "OMG! They made a fast factoring algorithm!" But then I read the article and discover it only works for unencrypted messages. Gee.
Like <president@whitehouse.gov> for example?
Banu
Just remember a not so old story where there was reported the presence of e-mail encryption software was considered as evidence in some child porn case.
First they start using some very un-smart word-scanning piece of crap filtering system [and god help you if you write foreign language letters, or have a different style than the average], then they will punish the use of mail signing and encryption software [which is something I regularly do], then if the filtering still has a false positive rate above 99% they will ban e-mailing. Then they will find out other forms of efficient communication exist.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Everyone knows that you just have to check the evil bit. (Some terrorists may be sophisticated enough to tamper with the evil bit but if they use Windows, the lack of the bit will stick out like a sore thumb.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Once the cops are convinced that you are guilty of something, they can put a case together that will convince a jury. We have lots of wrongful convictions to prove that. We now have laws that will let the authorities lock you up forever without a trial based on security concerns.
The case I have in mind is a guy who was wrongfully convicted of murder. The lead investigator was certain it was him because he was a 'weird guy'. He concentrated on only this suspect and assembled enough circumstancial evidence to get a conviction.
This of pseudo-science proposed in tfa will lead the authorities to investigate and charge completely innocent people. Some of those investigated will be convicted. This reminds me of the fruit machine used in the 1950s to detect homosexuals (who could be easily blackmailed into betraying their country).
This is why we need privacy laws. This is why the Patriot act should be repealed.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." FDR
So It is now no longer good enough to just have the ability to subpoena your records if your arrested?Now the government wants to activly sort/monitor the emails of an entire nation. HMM I smell more violations of the rights of the people. How much more of this are we willing to accept. How much longer until dissidents start a revolution. That's right I said it a revolution. This sounds like a combo of search/packet sniffing software.Last I heard PGP and RSA encryption was still unbreakable. This will NOT be effective for the worst thieves or tererorists.
The old school "science" of Phrenology gets a new, snappy update for the 21st century.
"Here Bob, you hold him down while I measure the space between his eyes, and his kerning!"
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Graduate students, take notice. This research is a wonderful example of ... going where the wind is blowing; that gives you media coverage and funding from people who know even less than you ... not doing your background research; doing your background research would just discourage you, and it takes time that isn't required for convincing people who know less than you that your sexy proposal is worth funding
P147 1n 5lt.5n1nym1U6 u64 kn1wn crypt1, l23v2 n1 tr5c4. 4m52l != s5f4.
num=num-1
Ofcourse I know, if the system is sortof good inwhat it does, the above wont be too effective. But who wants will bypass such a thing. What about PGP?
I honestly doubt that the system will result in displaying the emails of those who actually are paranoid about their activity and doing things that aren't too legal. It'd be disturbing if they will be successfull with this type of privacy infringement. It's ILLEGAL to read one's snailmail. Why is it then legal to scan every email for keywords and having ultimately someone monitoring my emails cause their scanning-engine might, most plausable, flaw?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
+5, hilarious.
The vote's been tallied, and you've been evicted from the BB house.
See you in the place where there is no darkness.
Is support the glorious spread of democracy! I'm looking at YOU, Patriot!
he must be, he has convinced some people to part with real cash in return for his ramblings, in fact as this probably puts food on his table he has a vested interest in convincing as many (non-technical) people as possible
in which case i think the only criminal here is Skillicorn, unless he does this "research"/fraud for free
Yea, bad gys kcant spel.
Mojo Turbo http://theway.blog.org
So if you don't talk about things which a terrorist would talk about, you are a terrorist?
like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
Yes, it's also how every other nuclear network of friends operates. Not all my friends know eachother. Not all a bank's customer's know eachother, not all a mailing list's users know eachother.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
-Tacitus
Government is already too invasive. I'm already forced to seek a building permit before I can erect a structure on my own property. The fines for ignoring this, (and say, having the gall to build a solar powered house which is not connected to the AC power grid, or (horrors!) a straw-bale house), are huge and the government's reasons for these laws are utterly ridiculous.
Any professor who suggests that we should be looking to monitor email content is not thinking clearly. The Government already has their nose in everything, and telling us that, "It's For Our Own Good," is NOT a valid excuse.
It's MUCH more important that people be able to make mistakes -and even die through their own faults- than live ensnared in the safe-keeping of a bunch of ignorant civil servants who are trying to build a Starfleet future where everybody dresses the same, and nobody is allowed to think or act outside a bunch of pre-set 'safe' boundaries designed for middle-class suburbanites who exist in eternal ignorance of the real world, who actually believe in the Discovery Channel, who drink milk, and live in absolute terror of anything you can't experience beyond the confines of a nice, respectable department store.
-FL
Letter from College:
Hi Mom,
I blew it and bombed the final exam. The physics
prof put the gun on my head and told me to work harder.
I could kill him. I feel like having a knife
at my throat. The anger feels like poison in my
blood but I know it is my fault and the all is
blamed to that virus, I had been laboring with
for quite a while. I'm working on it mom! I promise
to make you proud. I can not wait to be on the subway
home to work on my final project on weapons of
mass destruction in my political science class. Its
mental terror.
Love
Your son
P.S. The powder you sent me works well for my
skin infection. Strong agent.
Obviously the most suspicious emails, as no doubt Dr Skillicorn has discovered from the Enron training, are those ending in phrases such as, :-)
" This e-mail is intended only for the named recipient(s) and may contain information that is privileged , confidential and/or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. . . . "
Sounds just like he's a bullshit artist out to get himself a dish of US government funding and publicity. And likely he'll get both.
Why not apply this logic to off-line policing. Say for example you're a muslin, have recently been in afghanistan, hold a pilot license and are quite handy with a gun. The chances have it you are terrorist. Or maybe a commercial pilot.
The logic this system uses is so funadamentally flawed in so many ways I really can't be bothered to go into its details. Let's just say these are the sort of methods even STASI would have thought twice about implementing.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
How many of the millions who email President Bush more than 10 times a year email each other? Not many.
:) at CN.
Ditto those who email CowboyNeal 10 times a year.
As a side note, in both cases most of those people need to get a life.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This email doesn't contain the words r0lexx, v!/\gr4 or c14ll4s. It sticks out like a sore thumb from 99% of the email traffic we've intercepted, he must be up to no good!!!!
*Splort*
Statistical analysis of word (token) frequency works great in a closed domain set, such as the Enron corpus. But once you scale up to the ISP level it falls down horribly.
:2 004.1265082
Why ? The size of the token database increases massively to the point where it becomes un maintainable. Every spelling mistake, word variant, not to mention foreign language, gets included. Eventually you are unable to separate the wood from the trees. Let alone make statistically significant assertions about a single message.
And lets not mention the fact that all the work on detecting deception in correspondance hase been done on English language text. Those pesky al-Qaeda types tend to speak Arabic. So before you can even begin to detect dodgy emails written by al-Qaeda, you need to construct a written arabic parser. Then you need access to a large corpus of Arabic emails (if you have one I'd be very interested too). Then you need to research the lexical rules that tend to signify deceptive arabic.
Its an interesting problem, but not even trained and experienced intelligence operatives are able to routinely detect deceptive correspondance, so coding that algorithm is quite tricky.
This is a good place to start
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.
...sounds familiar.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
First thing they'll do is sniff out anyone with a /. userID, then ignore anything that looks like a sig.
/.'ers are more likely to blow a brown trouser note than to blow up something.
I don't know if they then pay special attention cuz we think we can bypass their filters, or completly ignore us cuz 99.9999998% of
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
How many criminals are going to send plain text emails discussing criminal activities?
This is clearly just designed to appeal to the government of Police State America, probably to get more funding.
This whole obsession with 'terrorists' is just becoming tiring. There are very few 'terrorists' in the world that the Americans didn't create through their own acts of terror. If America would stop its interference in the affairs of other countries, there would probably be almost none at all outside of the White House.
- Many languages are conjunctive/agglutinating in nature (e.g. Turkish, Finnish, Swahili). This means that words of sentences aren't isolated (like most European languages) but are in fact formed from 'parts' that change depending on the surrounding words. Moreover, modifying pre-/suffixes are used as inflections for e.g. verb paradigms. This results in language that effectively have literally billions or even an infinite number of possible "words". It is impossible to do keyword-based analysis on such languages without a full morphological parser for each language to break a word into its 'parts' - such a parser is a massive task.
- Chinese is the opposite, it is a totally "isolating", meaning each word is distinct with no inflections, and because different characters are used for different words there are NO SPACES between words. So you cannot begin to analyse Chinese data at all unless you have a full "Chinese segmenter" to locate word boundaries.
The need to do further disambiguation further complicates all of this analysis.
There is pretty much no way for this type of analysis to be really accurate under the current level of written language analysis technologies.
Gosh. You mean criminal conduct like murder, mayhem, theft, burglary, breaking and entering, rape, pillage, plunder, cheating on income tax, unlicensed gambling, bingo, adulturation, bigamy, prostitution, uttering and publishing, libel, mischief, cable sipping, cooking books, grand theft auto, selling on rumor, back door buggery or sea lawyering? Don't you get tired of self-inflated academic liberals whose major professor once read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and now thinks they're telepaths just like grandma?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
"HMM I smell more violations of the rights of the people"
Yes, but just remember, it might not be american law enforcement doing the violating. AFAIK ECHELON (search google for it) exists and is working. If say the british government did the searching through american email it would not actually be the american government spying on their own citizens and vice versa.
"How much more of this are we willing to accept."
I'm hoping not a lot more.
"This will NOT be effective for the worst thieves or tererorists."
True, it looks more like an excuse to infringe upon people's privacy than an effective method of law enforcement.
Silly rabbit
terrorist bomb al qaeda bin laden firebomb death destruction chaos terror plane WMD nuclear weapons
Yes the people who are "up to something" actually write differently. Most of the time they use phrases like "validate your bank account",
"please verify your credit card information", etc.
--- Eat my sig.
... because the Solution to Terrorism has been posted here today. We don't have to worry none about whatever jihad. Obviously all the evil in the world is caused by the White House "interferences". Let's solve the issue by voting for a crook instead of a jesus-freak. Anyway, even if the White House issue is solved someday by having Hilary Clinton ruling the country, there will always be Tel-Aviv to blame.
There's no evil in this novel. Then again, there isn't a single letter 'E'.
I wonder if this story would flag the dodgy thoughts detector...
Using a keyword instead of actual investigation is both lazy and useless. Look at how bad the that works in the Help desk industry. How much time do you waste because the person on the other line isn't able to think the problem thru? And we wonder why Ossama walks free and Saddam is in Jail (not that he shouldn't be). It was just took less effort to find him.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I was just about to order some extra razors from some proles via email too! I had better go to the ministry of truth and rewrite this post after I am done.
News: Chocolate rations are up from 200g to 150g this week.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If they're using text classification, such as Bayesian, all you have to do is have a good concept of whitespace. Just break your tokens up apropriately, and compare the weightings to your corpus.
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
You just need a good corpus for your text classification.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If police investigations weren't so costly, invasive, long-lasting, prejudicial, inhibitive of populations, and otherwise nightmarish, we'd do well to investigate everyone, especially anyone "different" (or "too similar"). But they are nightmarish for everyone targetted, while only those actually commiting crimes could possibly "deserve it". Which is why America developed our "due process", and thrived under it, to the extent we get it; other countries are no different. Now that we're abandoning our privacy, our right to due process, to be secure in our papers, property and effects from unwarranted government intrusion, we're doomed to live a nightmare where everyone is guilty.
--
make install -not war
Look at the nubmer of civilian casualty in Irak/Afghanistan (*), oh, sorry,you call them "collateral damage"... Each of those had a familly. Each of those familly might be drowned enough in sadness and anger, and by the desire that this never happen again, that they decide to take in their own hand the "punishment" and even revenge. There you have sown the next terrorist generation
(*) and I am not even counting the number of country where the good old US of A support a dictatorial govt, or attempt to overthrow govt openly disliking them...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Boy this is going to really work.
Hey bill hows is it going? I was wondering if you modified your engine to get more horse power on it? last time I talked to you, you only had 230 horse power. Well I hope I can catch you at the car show this week. what day are you planning to attend? Well see you soon.
-Greg
PS did you finish painting your car?
translation: what time is the job? still 2:30? also can you confirm the day? are we a go or not?
_____________________
hey greg yah I modded my car and am trying to obtain my goal of 345 horse power right now. I finished the paint job to a bright green and I will see you on Sunday at the show if you can make it.
translation: 3:45 and we are a go for sunday
_____________________
Yah I can really see this program flagging this for terrorist/criminal intent.
Many of the slashdot comments here were completely predictable and reflect a mental problem of geeks - a near-autism that wants things to be boolean rather than analog. I've seen this tendency on many other stories, and I think it is probably hurting some of you in the workplace or school. One poster worries that so many emails will be flagged that we'll create a huge pool of federal employees to read them. Others think they'll be unjustly accused of crimes due to some "false positive".
This kind of system generally calculates one or more scores. Common sense tells me that messages with scores exceeding a threshold would be manually inspected. Weighting factors and thresholds would be adjusted over time to tune the system.
This is how many things work presently. Anti-spam, anti-abuse, anti-fraud. You triage the stream of transactions into black, gray and white. The gray should be the smallest band by far, and is inspected by humans. Those humans tune the system to better handle the ambiguity.
If you took any widely used heuristic tagging system like this and attempted to explain it on slashdot, it would be met with the same torrent of near-autistic objections. Essentially, "it can't work and shouldn't work because it's not 100% perfect." But the real world runs on many tools that are not 100%. Because the alternative is manual inspection of every single transaction, which is cost-prohibitive.
Maybe statistics is the key mental tool for geek-autists to grapple with ambiguity. Statistics can help us explore correlation between A and B without asserting rigid linkage between A and B.
Anyone who's watched the classic documentary "Enemy of the State" knows that the NSA is already eavesdropping on all of us for the words "Allah", "bomb" and "President". That's why I always greet people in cyberspace w/ "Allah bomb President!"
[o]_O
www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrthefourfreedo ms.htm
It looks like a legitimate quote. Maybe the later Franklin stole it from the earlier Franklin.
I remembered the quote, googled on "give up essential freedom franklin" and that's what turned up.
w#3n vvil1 7h3y Re4l1ze t|-|i5 15 i/\/\p0s5i13lE?
idiots...
I'm curious, could Bayesian anti-spam filters be used to determine if an email is suspicious? They work pretty good with regular junk mail. You just have to train it.
Here's the idea. Each industry has it's own terminology, so you'd have to create filters for each industry. (That would take care of the bulk of your "Price"=="PriceWaterHouse" issue).
For each such industry, you'd go through the emails of companies or people that have been convicted of wrong-doing, and manually go through each email, flagging whether it is "suspicous" or "not suspicious". (Boring job, but someone already does that during a criminal trial, anyway). You'd keep doing this for all convinced criminal cases until the filters are "good enough".
During a regular criminal trial, someone has to scan through all emails looking for suspicous emails. The filters could pinpoint all suspicious emails, the filters are "good enough".
Once the filters are "good enough", you can let them loose on the population. Since personal email may come from multiple industries (there's no way of telling where joe-sixpack works), you'd have to run the spam filters for all industries on each email. If even one spam filter is triggered, the email from joe-sixpack is flagged for human review.
The filtering doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to reduce the number of emails down to a manageable level that can be inspected by the people of the Ministry of Love or the Ministry of Peace.
> At any rate I find this line of inquiry
> disturbing for civil rights reasons,
[***BAYESIAN FILTER CLOAK ON***]
Yes, but if we don't do it, the terrorists will win. As Ben Franklin once said "They who would give up an essential security for temporary liberty, deserve neither liberty or security"
[***BAYESIAN FILTER CLOAK OFF***]
-------
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
If you want to criticize what Skillcorn is doing on a technical basis, try reading the actual technical report that he wrote on the subject, rather than basing your conclusions on a news article. Heck, you might even learn something.
Skillcorn's papers, including this one, can be found on his Queen's U. website.
I see people saying encryption will become a flag-raising technology if people use it to bypass email scanning, but with all the ways you can send an email, currently the system could probably be bypassed simply by sending a document attachment or a zipped text file with a cover note - the email scanner will see the note and be happy and the real message will be left in the attachment, because the developers are too lazy to scan various attachment formats and will continue to be lazy until its bought up in some meeting, where they will then only implement it for a few common formats.
Then there's Microsoft's latest Office which does all this DRM crap - restricting who you can forward to, i'm guessing theres some encryption there and as soon as the majority of people have upgraded, email scanning will become a thing of the past without the masses ever being the wiser.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
From what we already have seen the (US) government do, or claim to want to do, it should come as absolutely NO suprise that they are anxious to implement such a program on everyone (except themselves).
There is such a blur as to who is more dangerous to us, the so-called terrorists, or the government.
And even more concerning, is that they may actually be one-in-the-same.
After all remember on 911, not only were there NOT any jet fighters nearbye nyc to protect it (in light of what happened in '91), but there was acually a call to: STAND DOWN to those that were several hundred miles away.
And how can anyone forget that look on bush's face when he was told that planes where attacking nyc & dc? I still can't put my finger on what his expression meant.. but it was like.. he was 'disturbed' or 'tormented'. But as we all know, not disturbed or tormented enough do *DO* anything about it for at least several minutes.
Osama was paid a Billion dollars to *beat* the russians in afghanistan.. which he did a great job..
So now we're are to beleive he is guilty of 911 and not a friend of the cia anymore, JUST because he said he was suprised that the buildings come down so quickly? Well I don't ANYONE who wasn't suprised that the buildings came down so quickly!!
We can only wonder how much money/help he is getting to *take-the-rap* for this *Crimes-Against-Humanity-Conspiracy*.
If we want to get to the bottom of this and help defeat terrorism, then we need to pray and try to convince bush to take a gun to his pickled hed asap. :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
This should really read "How to extract lots of money from a clueless government".
Just lik3 the Unabomb3r. All th3 3vil p3opl3 hav3 k3yboards with malfunctioning ''-keys. A simpl3 hu3ristic analysis will catch th3s3 miscr3ants and th3y can b3 r3port3d to the Hom3S3c pr3-crim3 division. Th3 smart on3s 3v3n hav3 th3 3vil-bit turn3d on in th3ir IP pack3ts.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The key here is exactly as you put it, "The layman home buyer". --I am tired of having my life and creative freedom curtailed because most people choose not to empower themselves. I want to build my OWN house. --This means, I am taking the time to research house construction, and I will hire some skilled labor to help me out. If people feel the need for building codes to protect them, then they can have them, and such houses can be labeled 'Government Certified'. They can get an insurance break. (I don't need or want insurance, either, thank-you very much.) There are ways to create these rules and laws which would offer 'protection' to those who want it, and allow those like me to waive it all so I can get on with my life and build it however I choose to.
You know, if there's a law that says you have to be grid-connected, that doesn't mean you actually have to use that connection.
Actually, it's not that simple. I know a couple who were told it would cost them $15,000 just to have the power company sink poles and run cable up to their house, which is set back about 600 meters from the road in a stand of woods. They would rather spend $15,000 on solar panels and electronics than pay the power company to connect them to the grid.
As for a straw-bale house, I'd imagine that such a thing would be completely engulfed in flames in a matter of seconds if a fire broke out. There's probably a reason why they won't let you build one.
There are some Straw Bale houses which have stood for over a thousand years. --The straw itself is plastered over with mud/concrete on the inside and outside of the structure so that it is not even visible, and thus offers almost no danger of fire. The insulative qualities of straw bale are generally superior to even the 'high tech' materials in most modern buildings. And such houses are fast, sturdy and much less expensive to build.
The reason the government doesn't want people building alternative housing, is that it makes people free. --With clever design, NO money needs to be spent on oil-based utilities. Geo-thermal energy can heat a house for free, (minus the start-up costs), forever, and a good bank of solar cells and chemical batteries can provide all the electricity you could ever need. If everybody had a house built this way, the power utilities would go broke and they know it. The government is a tool used to protect their line of profit.
-FL
This is an example of an unfortunate consequence of modern technology, increasing security 'fears' (I won't say if they are legit or not, I don't know), and (what could be considered) unscrupulous programmers....
... which is basically what they'd be doing with our E-mails, to try and find links.
While I can't find it, I seem to recall some earlier report stating that some young programmer had created a program that would sift through old case files from dead or dry cases and find leads (anyone have a link to this?)
There will probably be "misses" (false leads)... and I really can't see this as anything but a bad idea without some sort of aggregate threat counter or something of the sort, but... I do babble on.
===
Suffice it to say, this is scary, but what isn't these days...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
"like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
This is how most of academia works. How many of your classmates do you email? A handful. How many of us take/took advantage of emailing a lecturer who's willing to read email?
I did an Astronomy Masters on the Internet. I emailed the handful of lecturers as much as or more than I emailed other students.
This comes across as being from the terrorist handbook of Elmer Fudd....be vewwy vewwy quieeet...I'm hwunting twerrorists hehehehehehe.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"it's really quite simple. You just look for anything that is PGPed. Only criminals would want to hide what they're doing. Give me grant money!" -Possibly from Dr. Skillicorn. Possibly from Dr. Doom.
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Filter avoidance: Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Computational morphology is doing very, very well these days. Hell, you can buy morphological analysis SDKs that cover over two dozen languages.
I think this man should get all the research money he can stand. It's clear his "research" will yield poor results, but if he can suck down more of Big Brother's big bucks and keep them from spending money on something that will really invade our privacy, good for him. Better this waste of money than a more effective domestic Echelon system.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
With Homeland Security spending, likely someone will be dumb enough to back these people.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't worry! People will not be watched by this technology!
The whole point is to narrow down the list of people that are watched using more expensive technology (such as human agents risking their lives. Since this technology quite obviously doesn't fulfil the goal, it will be dumped (or not used at all).
Sigh. There's too much witch-hunting going on in the US government today. At least this one's Canadian, and the US government probably isn't willing to endanger its Precious Bodily Fluids, er, umm, National Information Infrastructure by letting Foreigners contribute to the Echelon Filtering Standards.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Then obvious result would be that anyone sending encyrpted mail would be "flagged". Makes it much easier than all the complicated analysis, right ?.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Uh, congratulations, there are about 6000 languages in the world. Only 5976 to go now!
Seriously, the complexity of morphological analysis has NOTHING to do with the ENGINES. There are very good engines available, but an engine is useless without a collection of rules for each language. And morphological rules are not only HIGHLY language-specific, but also extremely complicated - it takes a lot of resources to compile accurate and comprehensive rules for each language. There are literally thousands of rules that must be compiled and tested for each language. That's why only a few of the major languages are covered.
Moreover, it's still very limited. It doesn't handle text with errors in it very easily, for one thing (e.g. missing letters, typos, grammar errors .. especially non-mother-tongue speech is full of such errors). It becomes exponentially orders of magnitude more complex if the text has many errors in it. Modern language use is also very "mixed", e.g. Chinese or Arabic text often mixes in bits of other languages, place names, person names, etc.
Then there are Unicode processing issues, e.g. surrogate pairs for characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane where for example thousands of Chinese Proper Names are located.
That engine you point to doesn't much apart from stemming.
Oh, and none of this does any disambiguation for you --- oops. Although some of them do limited tagging - whoopee.
But nice try at debunking my post. If not rather lame, uninformed and totally incorrect.
His theory is that people who are "up to something" are more likely to write differently than people who aren't Yeah, they are more likely to use solid encryption which renders this whole stupid effort useless.
I have only one thing to say: "Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne, bercent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone."
It's MUCH more important that people be able to make mistakes -and even die through their own faults- than live ensnared in the safe-keeping of a bunch of ignorant civil servants who are trying to build a Starfleet future where everybody dresses the same, and nobody is allowed to think or act outside a bunch of pre-set 'safe' boundaries designed for middle-class suburbanites who exist in eternal ignorance of the real world, who actually believe in the Discovery Channel, who drink milk, and live in absolute terror of anything you can't experience beyond the confines of a nice, respectable department store.
Those evil, milk drinking bastards! And I heard some of 'em belive the Discovery Channel, and not in Jehovah! And they are afraid of department stores! Oh, no! Oh, no! Kill 'em all!!! It's the only way to be safe!
So you went to Dr. Skillicorn's site and read the technical report? You will find your concerns and more addressed quite nicely. "Crap" is an opinion on research based solely on the interpretation of an article written by a reporter who is clearly not a subject matter expert.
Better yet, there's an interesting site called Citeseer. Intelligent types in computer science use it to look for papers and check out the credentials of the authors. Dr. Skillicorn is ranked 2999 of 767319 in the site's list of most cited authors. Do you really think he attained that (peer reviewed) stature by publishing tripe?
One hopes and prays that you are in no way involved in any kind of academic or technical pursuit. Your uninformed and flawed knee-jerk opinions will blind you to so much and keep you from producing anything of quality.
Insightful?! As if.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.