Fergie's Tech Blog

Hazard a Guess: Fortune 500 or al-Qaeda?

In an interesting follow-up to yesterday's story about how traffic analysis can be deceptive in and of itself, this comes to us via Defense Tech.

People working together on projects tend to interact in fairly predictable ways -- whether that project is installing a new computer system, or blowing up a building. So looking only at the links between people won't tell you much about what those folks are up to. At times, the links can be rather deceptive, in fact. Especially if your data set is huge, like the NSA's ginormous database of phone records. Other information is needed, to fill in the gaps.

Here's an example, [above]. Can you tell which cluster is from a Fortune 500 company, and which one is from Al-Qaeda? Network analysis guru Valdis Krebs shows this slide to corporate and government audiences. Their answers are usually pretty scattershot. Take your guesses in the comments section. Valdis will be back later on with the right answer.

More here.

posted by Fergie @ 5/12/2006 09:17:00 AM