Syracuse University Professor: Weakening Web Encryption to Help ID Terrorists Ill Advised

Sucheta Soundarajan

A Syracuse University Computer Science Professor says It would be ill advised to require Silicon Valley companies to weaken encryption or security in order to assist authorities in the fight against terror, despite criticism from a U.S. Senator. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is criticizing tech leaders for not doing enough to address concerns about the use by terrorist groups of encrypted communications. According to Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Sucheta Soundarajan, “Any such reduction in security would also assist the governments of rogue nations and oppressive states around the world. This would cause huge problems for American citizens in the long run, even if it seems appealing in the moment.”

Soundarajan’s research focuses on the structure of social and other real-world networks. She is interested in a variety of problems related to social network analysis, including community detection, link prediction and network similarity. She is currently studying how communities change over time and, in particular, the structural factors that influence a community’s evolution. She is also interested in developing methods to obtain accurate samples of large network.

She can be reached at 614-707-9646.