DARPA to start checking your email for threats - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

DARPA to start checking your email for threats

Troops’ emails will be under surveillance as part of a new Defense Department project to help detect potential “insider threats,” or potential traitors or terrorists inside the military.

A new project backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aims to create “a suite of algorithms that can detect multiple types of insider threats by analyzing massive amounts of data — including email, text messages and file transfers — for unusual activity,” according to a statement from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is helping develop the system.

The aim is to identify threats similar to that posed by Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence specialist who allegedly leaked thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, or Nidal Hasan, the Army major accused of killing 13 people in a shooting spree at Fort Hood in November 2009. Authorities say Hasan had contacts with Islamic extremists overseas before the shooting.

DARPA describes the project, officially known as the Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales program, as “insider threat detection in which malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by a trusted individual are detected against a background of everyday network activity,” according to the agency’s website.

A DARPA spokesman said he was unable to provide further information about the project, to include whether the tracking will be limited to official government computers; when such monitoring could begin; or how many troops might be monitored during the development phase, which is slated to take two years.

By tracking keystrokes and file downloads, the new surveillance system will create “a very short, ranked list of unexplained events that should be further investigated,” according to the statement from Georgia Tech.

Insider threats are on the rise, military intelligence experts told Congress in December. Authorities have identified at least five instances of plots or attacks from troops who had become radicalized.

“The Fort Hood attack was not an anomaly,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., at a Dec. 7 hearing that focused on the military’s insider threats. “It was part of al-Qaida’s two-decade success at infiltrating the U.S. military for terrorism, an effort that is increasing in scope and threat.”