Three researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology -- James Okolica, Gilbert Peterson, and Robert Mills -- have published a paper that outlines an algorithm for mining email data and identifying patterns of transmission that might tell managers when employees are keeping a secret.

In a nutshell, the algorithm identifies email topics of interest that are communicated outside the organization, but never shared with others inside the organization. The identification of such topics indicates that employees "either have a secret interest in the topic or generally feel alienated from the organization," the paper says.

In the study, researchers applied a data mining concept called Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI), which has been used to extract specific information from a large body of data. By adding users to the body of data being studied, the researchers were able to identify patterns of content exchanged between specific users.