DIGITAL
SPYING EXPERT: University of Arizona associate professor Hsinchun
Chen’s software, among other things, provides super-speed database
searches.
Arizona Daily Star
U of A honing online intelligence
By Ryan Gabrielson, Tribune
September 17, 2006
Hsinchun Chen goes where terrorists gather. He monitors what they say
and, particularly, how they say it. He tracks who they are talking to,
and whether they are spreading propaganda or providing training.
“They’re hiding,” Chen said. “You need to dig them out.”
Chen is not operating undercover, or eavesdropping on nearby
conversations in an unmarked van on a darkened street. He is a
middle-aged, polite computer science professor at the University of
Arizona, working from a closet-sized office in Tucson. A supercomputer
in his building’s basement uses data-mining to scour the Internet and
analyze the intelligence it gathers for the U.S. government. Chen is
one of dozens of university computer researchers serving as online
intelligence officers training the next generation of digital spies.
In the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
many academics have joined ranks with the intelligence community, said
Peter Freeman, a National Science Foundation official.
“This time we’re on the front lines,” he said.
The role is unusual and, at times, awkward for academics. After
building a career on the premise of publishing what they know, their
funding is coming from agencies that specialize in secrets.
It also is a new course for the intelligence community which has
been forced to look outside of itself to devise effective battle
tactics against elusive extremist groups, Freeman said.
CONNECTING THE DOTS Terrorists have made the Web a
headquarters where they communicate largely without detection. The
Internet is a veritable blizzard of electronic activity, making it
highly difficult to track any one person or group, Chen said.
So agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the
Central Intelligence Agency have pumped millions of dollars into
computer science research.
The work is focused on data-mining, the process used to connect
the dots when there are billions of dots from which to choose. Analysts
construct formulas, known as algorithms, to unearth patterns in a huge
mass of data.
That data can be financial records, news articles, video files, message boards and personal e-mails.
Banks and cell phone companies have for years used it to recognize
abnormal spending or calling behavior, which signals that a phone or
credit card might have been stolen.
The intelligence community’s hope, Chen said, is that data-mining
can streamline the digital chatter to show where and how terrorist
plots are unfolding.
The tool has become so popular that in 2004, the Government
Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog agency, counted 199
data-mining programs under way or in development.
While the spy agencies’ interest has been a boon for computer
science researchers, it comes with conditions. Potentially the most
significant, several of the academics say, is their discoveries have to
be handed to agents who might use the information in ways they oppose.
“What the government’s going to do with it after is an issue that
everyone should worry about,” said Janyce Wiebe, a University of
Pittsburgh computer science researcher. “We’ve already got that
problem.”
SAFETY VS. PRIVACY Government forays into using
data-mining to hunt terrorists have ignited controversy and concern
that citizens’ privacy rights will be violated.
The Bush administration has had to fend off questions about its
warrantless surveillance of international phone calls and e-mails by
the National Security Agency, disclosed in news reports last December.
That operation was recently ruled illegal by a federal judge.
Three years ago, the intelligence community dismantled a massive
data-mining operation dubbed “Total Information Awareness” that sought
all forms of electronic information on people, including such personal
information as health history and travel records, to uncover terror
connections. The program came under deafening public criticism for its
alleged monitoring of innocent citizens.
Because data-mining allows analysts to get the information they
are looking for from a massive pile of data relatively quickly, it is
becoming far easier to monitor a whole population.
Computer science is developing tools that limit online privacy,
Wiebe said, and the American people “have to figure out how they’re
going to deal with that.”
Using multiple intelligence community grants, Wiebe is working to
develop ways for a computer to discern opinion from fact in text. Last
month, she was awarded part of a $10.2 million grant from Homeland
Security that, in addition to paying for research, requires her to
instruct the agency’s analysts to use her technology.
SPY SCHOOLS Most university researchers are devising
better ways to find and analyze online extremist information, but do
not collect it themselves. The aim of recent federal funding, in
addition to advancing datamining, is to establish spy schools within
universities.
Students are already receiving training in the field, said Edward
Hovey, director of the Information Sciences Institute at the University
of Southern California, but most of them go on to search-engine
companies like Microsoft and Google.
To date, data-mining has primarily been applied to solve business problems.
Teaching intelligence agents presents new complications, said
Hovey, who has received a grant to establish a spy school at USC.
“Somebody comes to you and says, ‘You know, I really need this
because I want to stop some guy from blowing you up tomorrow.’ It’s
really hard to say no,” he said. “On the other hand, to say, ‘I’m going
to go behind the curtain and do all kinds of nefarious illegal things,’
like the NSA did with the phone numbers, then absolutely I refuse to
even talk there.”
The university researchers say they are not working with classified material.
A majority of computer science researchers are not American
citizens, Hovey said, severely limiting how close they can become to
the spy agencies.
However, public Internet data, called “opensource,” is rich with
information on extremist groups, said Fred Roberts, a computer science
researcher at Rutgers University.
Public Web sites and message boards allow terrorists to connect
for free with those they hope to lure, mainly disaffected young men,
Chen said. The UA research team found multiple extremist organizations
from around the world using Yahoo and Google messaging groups to
recruit.
From there, the extremists can direct each other to increasingly
sophisticated Web sites that hold multimedia files explaining how to
carry out attacks. Chen’s team found an online video that gives
step-by-step instructions on how to execute a suicide car bombing.
“If they don’t get the tools they are just disgruntled young men,”
Chen said. The UA team passes its intelligence on to spy agencies. Chen
declined to name which ones.
COVERT CASH
Chen’s grant funding comes from every corner of the intelligence community.
But while the researchers’ work is to be made public, little
information is disclosed about what money the spy agencies are
providing the universities. The Tribune reviewed a database of federal
grants for the previous three years and found that intelligence
community cash is rarely handed directly to researchers.
One major program — “Knowledge, Discovery and Dissemination” —
involves nine spy agencies and has funneled research money through the
science foundation since 2001, government documents show. While the
program’s grants are listed in the database, it was never mentioned by
name.
The grant that provides much of the funding for Chen’s work came
from Homeland Security for a project labeled “Border Safe,” he said.
Again, the database does not include a grant from the agency for UA to
search out terror groups.
Instead, Homeland Security provided almost $2 million in 2003 to
the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit with
close ties to the Pentagon, for Border Safe.
Buried deep in the nonprofit’s public tax records for 2003 is a
document listing $663,566 provided to UA. The transaction is listed
only as “information management.”
DATA MINE FIELD There are several fields within
data-mining. Computer science researchers are hunting for the means to
analyze video as effectively as they do numbers, to understand what a
text is saying regardless of its language and identify its author by
how he uses his words.
Though Chen boasts his research is already netting important
information on extremists, as an anti-terror tool, data-mining has
significant limitations.
“It’s the hot thing to stop terrorism,” said Bruce Schneier, a
computer security expert with Counterpane Internet Security in Mountain
View, Calif. But, he added, “It is completely ineffective.”
The greatest flaw that Schneier sees is that datamining is likely
to generate a huge number of false alarms, patterns the computer
misinterprets as terror activity. Those false alarms waste law
enforcement’s time and prompt unnecessary surveillance, or possibly
detainment, of innocent citizens. The university researchers
acknowledge data-mining’s current shortcomings. As part of her
research, Wiebe said she is attempting to upgrade computers’ ability to
understand how humans use language. A classic example of the problem is
the phrase, “killed two birds with one stone,” she said. A computer
would interpret that as an actual event where the stone was a weapon,
the birds victims.
Contact Ryan Gabrielson by email, or phone (480)-898-5630
