Rutgers awarded $3 million for federal social monitoring project

Hayley Tsukayama Staff Writer

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, a $3 million grant this week to study patterns in online social networking, part of a four-university collaborative program begun this past summer.

The DHS appointed Rutgers to lead this consortium, which will also consist of researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Champaign, and the University of Pittsburgh. Rutgers’ discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science department is spearheading the research.

The grant provides financial backing for research to identify patterns in the speech found on public message boards and other Internet forums. According to the Rutgers newspaper, The Daily Targum, the algorithms in development will one day be able to “sift through massive amounts of text and decipher opinions—such as anti-American sentiment—that would be otherwise be difficult to do manually.”

This “Super Google,” as University of Southern California researcher Eduard Hovy called it, will be able to identify communications between possible terrorists prior to acts of terrorism. Researchers acknowledged the possibility of abuse, but cited non-governmental applications, such as tracking cultural trends.

Still, Director of the Technology and Liberty Project in the American Civil Liberties Union Jay Stanley told the Targum that a better approach would be “traditional law enforcement, not trying to sift the entire population to try and get out a terrorist out of it.”

Vassar College Chair of the Mathematics Department Professor Benjamin Lotto and Chair of the Computer Science Department Professor Nancy Ide agreed with their peers, and were quick to point out that government-funded research is nothing new. “Grants to mathematicians and other scientists have come from sources like the Department of Defense, the Office for Naval Research, and the National Security Agency for years,” Lotto wrote in an e-mailed statement.

In a separate e-mailed statement, Ide agreed, writing that research “involving extraction of information from texts and other media…will continue to go on whether or not there is funding for it for security purposes.” Ide went on to say, however, that “the danger is not in the research, per se.” The thing to worry about, she continued, is “how this capability is exploited. We hope our government uses it wisely and respects the privacy of its citizens, and the task of ensuring that it does falls on us.”

Ultimately, consortium researchers believe that the benefits of such projects outweigh the risks. “If you don’t develop it, then your enemy could be developing it,” said University of Illinois Professor Jiawei Han. “You cannot base it on the technology itself whether to do it. If you see the potential to save people’s lives, you should be able to develop it.”