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July 08, 2003
Dissertation Could Be A Security Threat
The only thing my own graduate work was a threat to was my own sanity, but here's a story, Dissertation Could Be Security Threat, from today's Washington Post of a different kind of dissertation danger:
Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant." Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because "it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling." But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure map.Gorman's work takes publicly available information about the nation's infrastructure -- power grids, fiber optic networks, etc. -- maps it all, and uses algorithms to find the weak points.
Interesting story about how using technology to crunch together a bunch of unclassified information results in aggregated knowledge that the government has an interest in classifying. The reporter does a good job of presenting both sides of the issue, though.
Posted July 8, 2003 12:59 PM