Prof may resolve dilemma over privacy vs. need to hunt terrorists
By Cynthia lee
Today Staff Writer
In Russian, there is no word for “privacy.” That never sat well with St. Petersburg native and former citizen of the Soviet Union Rafail Ostrovsky. Now a UCLA computer science professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ostrovsky is an expert in computer security and cryptography, the head of UCLA’s Center for Information and Computation Security — and a fighter on the front lines of the war against terrorism.
The genial Russian émigré and his graduate student, William Skeith, are poised to play an important role in protecting an individual’s right to privacy in the face of the government’s need to monitor communication in its hunt for terrorists. As the nation debates where the line should be drawn between the right to privacy and the need for surveillance, the duo have come up with mathematical algorithms that may actually resolve this dilemma. Their work is being evaluated by the CIA and other members of the intelligence community.
“Until now, the general perception has been that you have to encroach on an individual’s right to privacy to look for the bad guys,” said Ostrovsky, who left the Soviet Union for the United States in 1979. But Ostrovsky and Skeith have come up with a way to create a simple computer program to do the search without revealing to anyone, except the creator of the program, what it’s searching for and what it finds.
Currently, the intelligence community can capture large amounts of e-mail and other forms of digital communication going abroad and returning to the United States. Bringing all of this into a classified environment in Virginia or Washington, D.C., they must then sift through it to find specific secret code words or phrases that federal agents have learned mark terrorists’ communication. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process, the professor said.
Although 99.9% of what is searched is discarded, the approach raises questions about a possible violation of privacy, said the computer scientist, who makes clear that he takes no position on what is a legal or illegal search.
“We found that it’s possible to publish a little program that says, ‘Please run in the background for any e-mail or chat room, Web communication, digital newspaper or even transcribed phone conversations,’” Ostrovsky said.
If a message meets the secret criteria established by the program’s creator, the program will encrypt the message and save it to a small storage space. If it doesn’t, the message will be discarded, although it will look like it is being saved. Then whatever is actually saved can be sent to the intelligence community, which will decrypt it.
“Because of the mathematics behind it, the program will only show the documents that meet these secret criteria, and no other documents,” Ostrovsky explained, thus guaranteeing that the vast number of innocent messages will not be seen by anyone, including the intelligence community. On the other hand, since the program hides what it is looking for, it need not be classified, and thus can be used in much less secure environments, such as the laptops in police cruisers.
Even if the laptop is stolen, “the bad guys will not be able to figure out which documents are being collected,” he said. |
