Tracking killer bloggers like George Sodini through the web

August 5, 4:08 PMDC Technology ExaminerTanya Gupta

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Time after time now, we have had killers announce their bloody plans on the Web.  But we always find out after the fact.  The latest killer to have done so is George Sodini.  As you may have heard by now, Sodini entered a Pennsylvania health club Tuesday night and murdered three women in cold blood before killing himself. 

Sodini recorded all his plans faithfully on his blog.  Although the blog has since been taken down, enough people have copied the blog so that it is freely available on-line.  Here is one or just type in "George Sodini blog" in Google.  The blog is that of a seriously disturbed man.  However the more important thing is - is it possible to track these activities online so that we can tell who are the people out there who are writing down their plans for murder and worse on the web, before their crime ?  Do we have to find out about the blogs that killers kept, chat logs or their "chatter" on BBs, only after they have committed the crime they set out to commit, in full view of the watching world ?  Washington Post Reporter Yuki Noguchi interviewed Evan Kohlmann of the Global Terror alert, a couple of years ago.  Kohlmann's answer related to terrorists, but it may be equally relevant for killer bloggers:

"I agree, these sources of information can *potentially* be cross-linked and cross-referenced to create a virtual database of frequent visitors to terrorist websites and chat forums. The problem is, knowing where those websites and chat forums are, having access to them or to their usage logs, and still being able to sort through all that data in an efficient way. Surveillance systems like Carnivore have a very real limitation, in that they collect so much data it becomes somewhat overwhelming. The answer to your question is that a lot less aggressive surveillance and data mining goes on than you would imagine".

There is also an enormous amount of work going on under the umbrella of cybersecurity.  We had earlier interviewed Dan Risacher about cybersecurity research and objectives, and the related use of open source.  Much of the valuable research that we have already done on cybersecurity with respect to other threats and issues could potentially be used for domestic security as well.  However, it is well worthwhile remembering that in this day and age, privacy concerns will probably circumvent any effort to gather the kind of intelligence that will be needed to achieve our objectives.  Even if we manage to develop the technology that we need, any such surveillance effort will be difficult to push through politically.  The question then is - from the point of view of our society - is the privacy worth it ?

Tech Policy and Happenings:  You may be interested in the reasons behind a recent Twitter outage, how we can track criminal activity on the Web (George Sodini video), Teens and Twitter,  the use of social networking in the military, American Innovation in Crisis , Why Government keeps getting Technology Wrong , Yahoo and Microsoft vs. Google , a recent look at consumer satisfaction with federal websites, Cybersecurity: an interview with Dan Risacher at  DOD - Part 1 and Part 2, and Cloud Computing with Pete Tseronis

Lighter Side of Tech:  For some more lighter tech stories, check out Twitter prediction for "So you think you can dance", adorable online cat stories, the $50,000 Tweet, modern day hero:the libertarian Facebook pig, which still on the lam., interviews with Twilight stars at Com Con, the Top Ten Fight Scenes and Top Free Movies on on YouTube,  Bill Clinton's video with JFK and his status updates on Facebook, best of Hulu, and the top 10 creepiest vintage ads.