Information Security

Information Security

To describe the times these days would be to compel a pessimistic answer . It might be said that the world has gone through many rapid and unprecedented changes in the years following the turn of the century . Unnerving occurrences of increasingly unpredictable weather and erratic regional climates , great natural devastations , and perhaps , more than anything , extensive devastation and death from malicious attacks , are enough to rob anyone 's sense of security . Who could ever forget the first high-pro aggression of the century that infamously toppled the towers of the

World Trade Center in New York City and cost some couple thousand lives ? Indeed , to describe the present times would be to necessarily incorporate accounts of extremist acts violence and death , all of which can be attributed to an emergent global threat called terrorism . For the purposes of this , terrorism will be defined as the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective (Encyclopaedia Britannica , 2007 . The places and people targeted by such acts of violence may be random , or may be particularly calculated for shock value . In any case , the effects intended to be brought about and invariably engendered are fear and a general feeling of insecurity within the targeted population . With the losses of life and property and its constant threat on national security , terrorism must be contained and altogether stopped . The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS ) was established to specifically address matters involved in this particular national threat . Even then , the enemy is never seen or pinpointed at one specific and unmoving location , nor the individual identities and mastermind (s ) known . There must be a grand means of gathering information that may aid the DHS and similar-minded government agencies in exposing terrorist schemers red-handed . In a Congressional Research Service Report , Richard Best , Jr (2004 ) acknowledged that the task of preventing terrorist attacks in the country would necessitate better intelligence gathering . Information would be essential in detecting terrorist plots before they are carried out , especially with the amorphous quality of the perpetrators . Data from the transaction space are deemed a huge potential source that can provide valuable leads on terrorists on the move within the country . The transaction space involves many kinds of business matters and communications . Anyone who engages in a transaction will leave a trail of himself or herself in this information space , and plotting terrorists will surely have to engage in certain transactional activities in to put their plan in place . Thus , in the campaign against terrorism and for the more efficient protection of the American people against it , to obtain such information becomes necessary

To demonstrate the importance of acquiring such information that are otherwise deemed private and sensitive , a necessary discussion of the methods that can be used to gather it must then be made . Now , for the information in the transaction space to become useful there must be a grand means of...