Creating Barriers to Determination of Structurally Cohesive Subgroups

Science Center A255

Many activists and human rights defenders have turned to the use of encrypted communication as a result of governmental repression and surveillance. However, because encryption use is not predominant, using encryption for activist communication can act as a marker for suspicious activity. Furthermore, corporate surveillance facilitated by companies like Facebook is becoming increasingly common, much of which governments could potentially access. This study examines possible methods to prevent the identification of subgroups whom are using encryption within a communication network, with a special focus on the security concerns of activists and the broader social context of surveillance. We began by constructing a set of guiding philosophies for methodologies using activist materials and academic reviews. We selected “Fast determination of structurally cohesive subgroups in large networks” by Sinkovits et. al. as a model of state-of-the-art subgroup identification abilities, as the proposed algorithm within the paper is both exact and significantly faster than existing subgroup identification approximation algorithms. Additionally, Sinkovits et al.’s paper has the benefit of a published coded version of the algorithm and datasets utilized. A potential methodology for preventing subgroup identification by Sinkovits et. al.’s algorithm was then tested on the same social network Sinkovits et al. used as a primary case study in their paper.