15 May 2003




In criminal investigations, detectives could look at global email traffic to see if known criminals are part of a wider community. The technique would also work for phone calls.

Interesting but scary. Just imagine the fishing expeditions: Law Enforcement could wade thru tons of e-mail connections just looking for a pattern which establishes a central actor and then try to get a subpoena for that actor's specific e-mails (or his entire computer) without really establishing anything other than the fact that someone receives a lot of e-mail from a group of people.

.

No comments: