TERRORISTS or criminal gangs could give themselves away via their emails – even if they are communicating in code or only discussing the weather.
By looking for patterns in who emails whom, a new technique can quickly identify online “communities” and their ringleaders.
“If the CIA or another intelligence agency has a lot of intercepted email from people suspected of being part of a criminal network, they could use the technique to figure out who the leaders of the network might be,” says Joshua Tyler of Hewlett-Packard’s labs in Palo Alto, California. At the very least, it would help them prioritise investigations, he says.…
