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."

Comments

Dumbest thing I've read all week...

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

Skillicorn doesn't know all the ways suspicious e-mails might read differently from innocent ones. The beauty of his approach is that he doesn't need to know. His software is designed simply to look for messages that are different, based on word frequencies, from the mass of e-mails. It needn't understand the reasons for the differences.

Super. I'm predicting a whole lot of false positives...especially during the initial phase of this operation...

Also from TFA:

One difference might be the complete absence of words someone might possibly think would draw a law enforcement agency's attention to their e-mails, but that most people would occasionally use innocently (as in "my presentation yesterday really bombed.")

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:

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.

OMG! This is the pattern of emails in my company! My whole company is a giant terrorist organization! I had no idea!

/sarcasm

But here's the kicker...again with the quoting:

To help with his work, Skillicorn has been working with archives of e-mail from Enron Corp., the company at the heart of one of the most prominent scandals in recent U.S. business history. In some respects, he notes, the Enron e-mails are not a good sample for analysis, because Enron employees seemed to have no compunction about what they were doing. "People should feel some guilt or at least some self-consciousness when they're being deceptive," he says.

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:

Such technology has obvious applications in surveillance by law enforcement and security bodies, but Skillicorn suspects agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency have little need of his help. "I infer from things they say around me that some of this stuff they already do," he says.

Crap.

Re:Dumbest thing I've read all week...

[Otter]

If I understand correctly, what he's done is this:

1) Devised a theory

2) Tested it on a sample set of emails from Enron

3) Gotten poor results

4) Blamed the failure on Enron, for being just *too* evil for his theory to work!

Yawn. Maybe he should save the press release until he's gotten something to work.

Oh dear

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Agreed

[ebuck]

Worse yet, people will be watched and harrased by this technology, but never brought to court over it.

In a court, you can question the evidence used against you. Considering that the creator of this evidence indicated that he didn't need to know how it works, it's highly likely that you could get this evidence thrown out because it fails the test of provablility.

So this technology will "flag" people, and they will be watched "just in case". However, there's not going to be a court case, just continued monitoring until the budget to watch this person dries up. And it's very easy to get a bigger budget because you can argue, "We are watching 400,000 people who have been flagged as possible terrorists, we can't keep up. We need more money." Even when your flagging system has worse odds of finding a terrorist than the Lottery.