The DoD?s future-tech think tank has issued a call for technologies that will bolster America?s digital defenses by collecting, identifying and tracing the lineage of software, data and digital files. To wit:
The Cyber Genome Program will encompass several program phases and technical areas of interest. Each of the technical areas will develop the cyber equivalent of fingerprints or DNA to facilitate developing the digital equivalent of genotype, as well as observed and inferred phenotype in order to determine the identity, lineage, and provenance of digital artifacts and users.
The ability to look at a file and trace it back to its source would help intelligence and law enforcement not only seek justice when cyber crimes are committed, but intercept threats as they are unfolding in cyberspace.
Of course, there?s the dark side to all this. If this kind of digital ?genome? is developed, it means the government can trace any document you create straight back to your PC ? and you. The law-abiding among us may not mind, but the privacy protection types will likely have something to say about the government snatching data from the Web and tracing it back to the source. If Facebook and ?To Catch A Predator? have taught us anything, it?s that someone is always watching what we do online, but we might have felt a bit more comfortable when it wasn?t necessarily Big Brother.
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