The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.

Researcher Nick Belkin is one of the PIs; check out his presentation on the "Prospects for information 'selection'" for the Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office.

Also: GSA on SIS:

The Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office (UCAO) is developing a secure information sharing architecture, called HatWizard, to support intelligence information dissemination within the cryptologic community.

Also: Trust Architecture for Future Intelligence Processing, alternately titled "A Trust Framework for the DoD Network-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) Environment".

Government research to track online networking