The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet
chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly
released documents reveal.
In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the
documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat
terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at
the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated
monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room users.
EPIC director Marc Rotenberg, whose nonprofit group obtained the documents
through the Freedom of Information Act, said the CIA's clandestine
involvement was worrisome. "The intelligence community is changing the
priorities of scientific research in the U.S.," Rotenberg said. "You have to
be careful that the National Science Foundation doesn't become the National
Spy Foundation."
Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received
$157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed
in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for
eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to
discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without
human intervention."
Yener and Krishnamoorthy, both associate professors of computer science,
wrote that their research would involve writing a program for "silently
listening" to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and "logging all the
messages." One of the oldest and most popular methods
A June 2004
paper<http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.rpi.edu%2F%7Eyener%2FPAPERS%2F35.pdf&siteId=3&oId=2116-7348_3-5466140-2&ontId=1009&lop=nl_ex>
they published, also funded by the NSF, described a project that quietly
monitored users of the popular Undernet network, which has about 144,000
users and 50,000 channels. In the paper, Yener and Krishnamoorthy predicted
their work "could aid (the) intelligence community to eavesdrop in chat
rooms, profile chatters and identify hidden groups of chatters in a
cost-effective way" and that their future research will focus on identifying
"topic-based information."
"I don't know about chat-room surveillance, but doing research on issues
related to terrorism is certainly legitimate," Teich said. "Whether the CIA
ought to be funding research in universities in a clandestine manner is a
different issue."
[Homestead] Big Brother U.S. style,
Toni Hawryluk, 11/29/2004