US Government Scans 250m Daily Emails and Texts

The US Government's newly-incepted PRODIGAL programme has been raising privacy concerns.

PRODIGAL - which stands for the Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning - is capable of scanning no less than 250 million digitally-created messages every single day. That's all the emails, text messages and instant messenger-type communications sent within just US federal agencies and the US military.

The programme's sheer coverage scope has provoked concerns that, soon, the US Government's eyes will be on every single piece of data transmitted between US residents.

US Government Email Scanning

The US government email-scanning system is the brainchild of Georgia Institute of Technology, with assistance from DARPA - the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency responsible for progressing a host of military technologies.

PRODIGAL's brain is trained on unusual features within the normal data stream: key words that stand out or occur repeatedly, non-standard email addresses and atypical file server transfers. Solely concerned at the moment with data exchanged between federal agency workers and members of the US military, PRODIGAL's coverage could nonetheless expand to wider US society, its critics suggest.

"Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization", Professor David Bader from Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering explained to Fox News.

Government Daily Text Scans

Bader played down ideas, however, that what's being carried out within PRODIGAL could extend beyond the government's current levels of daily text scans, email-reading and message analyses. PRODIGAL, he said, only works in conjunction with internal systems, as opposed to the internet at large.

Rather, through looking closely at the type of information being sent, potential soldier fatalities could be avoided and potential classified data leaks could be stopped. In this way, said Bader, PRODIGAL is comparable to the Raytheon SureView system and the post-9/11 Einstein project, both of which aim to detect suspicious activities.

PRODIGAL will be in operation for two years at a total cost of $9m. Besides Georgia Institute of Technology and DARPA, other organisations involved include Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State universities and the University of Massachusetts.

Image copyright US Navy