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H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H
N N
E ** H-Net Magazine ** E
T T
H Volume One, Issue 1, File #13 of 20 H
N N
E Hacking SIGNET, logfile by WEAZLE E
T T
H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H-NET H
CONNECT 1200
8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p8p
Login: XXXXX
Password:
Please wait....
Welcome to the Special Intelligence Government NETwork....
****** ***** ***** ** * ****** ********
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[256/879/SIGNET001/1H6C6L]
: P.S.T.N. Access logged, last used 05/FEB/1990 13:20 GMT.
> ls
? unknown command 'LS'
> help
HELP knows about :
CRIS CCN STATUS IVAN CEDRIC PNC
CAFS FTR CDIIIU CODA CODIN1 COP
> help ftr
.
FTR [ Free Text Retrieval System] [SIGNET/help/0065458inf/ftr]
FTR makes searching for random items of information much faster than
previous methods. A search taking half an hour is a very long time indeed
by computer standards. The use of such time on a large system such as
SIGNET is also costly.
To make searching a database more efficient, more than one element may be
indexed.
FTR takes an alternative approach. Suppose, for example, that we want to
perform a search on unstructered data like the text in this file. Free text
retrieval can do that for us. A newpaper article - or thousands of other
potential data sources like it - could be fed into a database, without
predefining any structure or context for the data concerned, and every
substantive word of every record would be indexed. So every occurence of
any data item - whether it be in a newspaper report, a criminal records
file, a report from an informant, the electoral register - can rapidly be
located. The characteristic of free text storage is that there is no need
to define in advance what data will be entered or to define any structure
within which the given data will appear.
Because every significant word (other than common words like 'the', 'of' or
'for') in the SIGNET FTR database is indexed unless the user chooses
otherwise, a lot of extra space is required. Instead of, say, one 5
gigabyte disc store, we should probably need three, for the same amount of
basic data stored. The SIGNET computers' processor also has to be larger,
since as well as answering the terminal operators enquiries, it would have
to maintain the many indexes, keeping them up to date as new data was
entered, deleted, amended or moved around the storage system. For this
reason, the extra expense of operating an FTR system can only be met by
organisations - such as SIGNET - who expect many of their enquiries of the
database to be of the unstructured, unpredictable kind.
Another aspect of FTR is the ability to provide a dictionary, thesaurus or
'concordance' of equivalent or similar terms or phrases. Different people
entering data into the system may use different terms or descriptions for
the same attribute - for example, by describing eye colour variously as
'blue-grey', 'grey' or 'blue-green'; or light brown hair as 'fair' or just
'brown'. Such a dictionary system will also make an allowance for such
things as phonetically equivalent or near-equivalent names - for example, by
treating Smythe, Smith, Smiths and Schmitt as the same when searching the
database. The SIGNET computer uses a particularly extensive system of this
kind, called Soundex, when searching its criminal names or 'marked persons'
indexes.
When making an enquiry of the SIGNET FTR database the usual practice is to
specify various words, names or attributes, and the ways in which they might
occur together. The separate paragraphs of this text file form some of the
many records in the SIGNET database which usesd FTR. An Operative arrives
with news that a reliable informant has phoned to say that a man called
Young and, of all people, a vicar or a priest, whose name is unknown, plan
to murder a man known as Sandy. Typed on the VDU screen, the enquiry could
look something like this :
FIND : Young + [vicar,priest] + Sandy
This is an instruction to the FTR software to look for any record which
contains the name Young, refers to a vicar or a priest and to someone called
Sandy. There is no point in looking at everybody called Young - there would
be too many. But someone who is called Young and who is associated with a
priest or a vicar and with a man called Sandy, might be a very good bet
indeed.
The SIGNET FTR system should search and reply within twelve seconds.
Other FTR systems which can be accessed via SIGNET :
STATUS - Met. Special Branch & 'C Department'.
IVAN - Home Office (immigration service).
CEDRIC - Customs and Excise.
Also, of course, PNC, the Police National Computer.
ADDENDUM :
The power of computers to handle and analyse large quantities of personal
data was - until recently - constrained by technical limitations on the
absorption of information. Printed information, such as a magazine article,
was not 'machine-readable'. Until recently this meant that a human operator
had to enter information into the computer's memory store. Database
operators can now feed a magazine, newspaper or ordinary typed report page
by page into a scanner; the computer 'reads' the page using optical
character recognition (OCR), no further typing is needed.
End.
.
> logout
OK
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