[IP] U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study
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Date: October 13, 2004 4:57:52 PM GMT+01:00
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Subject: U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study
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U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study
By MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press
___________
TROY, N.Y., Tuesday, Oct 12, 2004 -- Amid the torrent of jabber in
Internet chat rooms -- flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about
politics and horror flicks -- are terrorists plotting their next move?
The U.S. government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's
taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room
surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.
A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to
develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the
scattershot traffic of on-line public forums.
Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the
Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about
anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They
are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade
software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew
Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans
have visited Internet chat rooms.
Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be
like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on
the sidewalk -- virtually impossible.
Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor
Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the
chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Mr. Yener will
track the times that messages were sent, creating a statistical profile
of the traffic.
If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within
seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they
were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room.
"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the
messages, who is talking to whom," Mr. Yener said.
In search of "hidden communities," Mr. Yener also wants to check
messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what's
being discussed in groups.
The $157,673 (U.S.) grant comes from the National Science Foundation's
Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in
co-ordination with the nation's intelligence agencies.
The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal
strictly on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the
intelligence community to determine its national security value.
Neither the CIA nor the FBI would comment on the grant, with a CIA
spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.
Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the
Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping.
But it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning
and co-ordination.
Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure
Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists
using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code
phrases are used. Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms'
usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from Web mail
to hiding messages on designated Web pages that can only be seen by
those who know where to look.
"In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture
on a home page about tea cozies, I don't know whether if you're any
better if you think chat would be any particular magnet," Jonathan
Zittrain, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.
Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not
violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the
traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms
for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making
it look like they are young teens.
But the idea of the government reviewing massive amounts of public
communications still raises some concerns.
Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes
unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the
Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.
Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar
over its impact on privacy.
"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that
creates the privacy problem," Mr. Rasch said, "even though no
individual bit of data is particularly private."
_________________________________
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20041012.gtchatoct12/BNStory/Technology/
---------------------------------
Osama, R U there?
The U.S. Intelligence Community funds ways to spy on chat rooms.
_____________
Terrorists may be plotting online, but spooks don't have the time to
sift through the chat room chatter.
Spurred by the United States Intelligence Community, the National
Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a six-figure grant to a
computer science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy,
New York, to investigate a more sophisticated, self-monitoring means of
spying on chat rooms.
Not surprisingly, privacy advocates say the initiative is more evidence
that the United States government's war on terror is impinging on the
liberty of its citizens. And one chat room operator discounted the idea
that Internet meeting places harbor terrorists as "nearly ridiculous."
Popular chat room operators AOL and Yahoo declined to comment for this
story.
As pedophiles and other criminals have learned the hard way, law
enforcement officials regularly patrol chat rooms. But according to the
NSF grant outline, detailing an anti-terrorist intelligence officer to
lurk in online communities hoping to nail al Qaeda is not a wise use of
time or money.
Enter professor Bulent Yener, the recipient of the NSF grant titled
"Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chat Room Communities" --
awarded under the NSF program Approaches to Combat Terrorism (ACT).
Mr. Yener seems to be less interested in government surveillance and
more into the structure of the Internet, or, how it works. Chat room
chitchat is easy to obtain, but difficult to analyze, making it the
perfect focus of his study, according to Mr. Yener.
This grant, aimed at making chat room surveillance fully automated, is
a good next step for research by Mr. Yener; he already has developed
software for collecting data from chat rooms.
After learning of the one-year, $157,673 chat room surveillance study
grant that Mr. Yener will receive starting January 1, 2005, Privacy
Rights Clearinghouse director Beth Givens expressed concern. "I worry
about the oversight. How far and wide will the research be used? Where
are the checks and balances? So far, I haven’t seen any." She's also
worried about an ongoing development of a "large interwoven structure
of government intelligence, industry and academics" in an effort to spy
on U.S. citizens.
Crafty intelligence
The U.S. Intelligence Community funds a large chunk of ACT research --
nearly half. "We talk to the Intelligence Community and we ask them
what areas they’d be interested in," said Leland Jamison, ACT director.
After coordinating with the Intelligence Community, ACT solicits
research from the academic community, namely mathematics and physical
science programs, including those of computer science. Less than half
of ACT funding comes from the Intelligence Community, he said.
Though the Intelligence Community is involved, all ACT research is
unclassified. The catch is, ACT has no idea what the Intelligence
Community does with their research. "We’d be the last to be able to
tell. It would be up to them to pick it up. We’re there to help the
process begin," Mr. Jamison said.
Both the CIA and the FBI declined to comment on the study specifically,
but offered some other thoughts. "We don’t surf the Net looking for
these types of things," said FBI spokesperson Bill Carter on the topic
of surveying chat rooms as a method to combat terrorism. He explained
that the FBI would need indication of criminal or national
security-related activity that would fall into the government
organization’s jurisdiction. One example of an instance where the FBI
would intervene: "If you have a group planning to blow up a building,"
Mr. Carter said.
"The CIA is aggressively pursuing terrorists," said CIA spokesperson
Anya Guilsher. But she officially declined to comment when asked about
specific methodology and technology used in the war on terror.
The grant outline describes chat rooms as being "particularly
vulnerable for exploitation by malicious parties."
One excerpt from the grant offers a scenario where an "adversary (uses)
a teenager chat room to plan a terrorist act." This fictional example
was discounted as "nearly ridiculous" by NetFX Media president Mike
Brede. His company runs a popular teen chat room from his Teenspot Web
site. "While I mentioned the scenario is farfetched, we still take
jokes or pranks from our users surrounding terrorist activity
seriously," Mr. Brede said. "If our chat rooms are being 'watched' we
are unaware. We have never been notified of such activity," he added.
"On a broad scale I'd say it's an invasion of privacy -- we don't even
monitor private chats. If there was a specific warrant then we would be
obligated and happy to cooperate in any means we could," Mr. Brede
said. _________________________________
http://www.redherring.com/article.aspx?a=10855&hed=Osama%2C+R+U+there%3F
---------------------------------
[Terror_Web] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Terror_Web/
---------------------------------
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
"Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic"
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)
John F. McMullen
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