A major software project is underway by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to monitor levels of Internet traffic and detect possible security breaches - and Dalhousie University is going to help build it.

But the researchers involved say the new technology won't give the government your private information.

"We won't have access to the content of e-mails, passwords or anything like that," said John McHugh, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Privacy and Security at Dalhousie.

"We're just looking at bytes and addresses."

Homeland Security awarded the $815,000 project to CA Labs, a New York software and information technology company.

CA Labs subcontracted some of the work to Dalhousie. It will be developed over the next 2½ years.

Mr. McHugh said the new software will be used by government and businesses to monitor who's trying to access their computer networks. It will look at the amount of information being sent from network to network and turn that complex raw data into some type of graph or chart.

Analysts will read those charts and look for patterns that can help reveal the work of hackers, spammers and cyber terrorists. Mr. McHugh said shady characters on the web will often contact hundreds of different Internet addresses, trying to look for weaknesses or important places to target. Sometimes they'll try to contact addresses that aren't even hooked up to a machine.

"If you try to make contact to a lot of addresses where there are no machines, it indicates you're probing around the network because you don't know what's there," Mr. McHugh explained Thursday.

"Most people who contact a network legitimately know what's there and they go directly to the web server, or mail server, or some other well-known service in the network."

The analysts will be able to determine the Internet address of the attacker, how long the connection between computers lasted and how much information was sent. They won't know exactly what was sent or the attacking computer's physical address. Mr. McHugh said the software may reveal general information, such as whether the service provider is EastLink, Aliant or some other company.

"I can't tell you who it was," Mr. McHugh said.

"I could tell you that EastLink customers, in general, visit Google. I'm not sure that's a particularly sensitive piece of information."

Mr. McHugh said if there was cause, a law enforcement agency could ask the Internet provider for further information on a customer.

The technology could eventually be used to track child pornographers, Mr. McHugh said. From a known child pornography site, the program could follow the trail back to an offender's computer.

Carrie Gates is a Canadian computer scientist and Dalhousie alumnae working at CA Labs in New York. Researchers there and in Halifax work together on the project. She said once the software is complete, it will be released to the public so anyone can use it to monitor their computer networks.

"It's fun (working on the project)," Ms. Gates said in a phone interview Thursday. "Here's this very high-level information and how do you determine based on that that here's a security event that isn't being picked up by anything else. . . . How do you begin to present that information."

Mr. McHugh said he understands why some people may be wary about their privacy on the Internet. He said the laws governing who can monitor web traffic really haven't been written yet.

He compares it to a case in Moncton, N.B., where men looking for prostitutes continually circled a neighbourhood. Once neighbours started taking pictures of the johns' licence plates and posting them on the Internet, the problem stopped. He said the situation is similar to crime on the Internet.

"The question is, when you circle the block a number of times, do you have any expectation of privacy?" he said. "And is the Internet like a public highway? Is it reasonable that there are people who can observe it and see where you're going? Those questions haven't been answered yet."