Narus develops a scary sleuth for social media

By Gideon Swift | Published: March 5, 2010

Narus is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.

The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating anonymously on the Internet.
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Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci’s own admission, however, it can do some pretty “scary” things.

The software’s user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link what Nucci calls “islands of information.” Hone can analyze VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.

“I can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn’t matter; I’m going to catch you.”

It uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. “It’s going to go through a set of documents and automatically it’s going to organize them in topics — I’m not talking about keywords as is done today, I’m talking about topics,” he said.

That can’t be done with today’s technology, he said. “If you search for fertilizers on Google… it’s going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,” he said. “If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer… it’s not even searchable.”

Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people.