May 31, 2005
The NY Times on Mapping Email Patterns
- Gina Kolata of the New York Times reports today on finding patterns in corporate emails: Enron Offers an Unlikely Boost to E-Mail Surveillance.
With access to large bodies of email, scientists hope to spot and map patterns of interaction:
For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone’s memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant?
The article includes a map generated by Dr. Carey E. Priebe and Youngser Park of Johns Hopkins University (see detail above). The patterns generated are similar to Marcos Weskamp’s popular Social Circles mailing list mapper.
One thing I found very interesting was the later part of the article talking about Echelon:
- The scientists who are studying the Enron data said they assumed intelligence agencies are doing similar classified analyses on international e-mail traffic. Since World War II, a five-nation consortium of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have cooperated in a vast communications collection and analysis program called Echelon.
...
"They can monitor discussions without actually isolating individuals," Dr. Berry said. "They can assess morale. If they make a cut in salaries, how long does the unhappiness go on? You could track topics and get a sense of how people are responding to policies and flag potential hot spots." Or, he said, managers might be able to learn which people have too much time on their hands.
And, as Dr. Skillicorn notes, if you try to write bland e-mail messages with hidden communications, chances are the programs will pick those out, too.
"It's clearly Orwellian," Dr. Berry said. "And I know that freaks people out."
Posted by volubis at May 31, 2005 12:20 AM