PORTLAND, Ore. -- Researchers in Switzerland are claiming to
have developed a new source-location algorithm they say could
replace the brute force method of identifying national security
and other threats used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and
others. In a paper published Friday (Aug. 10) in the journal
Physical Review Letters , researchers at École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne said they have demonstrated that relatively
small numbers of network nodes can be used to predict a source
location. Their selective method varies from the computationally
intensive method used by NSA and others to scour all network
nodes for potential threats. The researchers said the key to
determining the relevant subset of network nodes to make more
accurate source location is identifying the network structure,
the density of its nodes and the number of “information
cascades,” which occurs when users on a network observe the
actions of others and tend to act accordingly. The algorithm,
called "Sparse Inference," also