[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Security officials to spy on chat rooms

[Mike Rozak]

Here's an interesting article from ZDNet, titled "Security officials
to spy on chat rooms":

  http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5466140.html.

Read the article and you'll know what all those AFK people are
doing...

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au

--- Attached ---

The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of
Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible
terrorists, CNET News.com has learned.

In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects
that newly disclosed government 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.

Even though the money ostensibly comes from the National Science
Foundation, CIA officials were involved in selecting recipients for
the research grants, according to a contract between the two
agencies obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC) and reviewed by CNET News.com.

NSF program director Leland Jameson said Wednesday the two-year
agreement probably will not be renewed for the 2005 fiscal
year. "Probably we won't be working with the CIA anymore at all,"
Jameson said. "I think that people have moved on to other things."

The NSF grant for chat-room surveillance was reported earlier this
year, but without disclosure of the CIA's role in the project. The
NSF-CIA memorandum of understanding says that while the Sept. 11,
2001 attacks and the fight against terrorism presented U.S. spy
agencies with surveillance challenges, existing spy "capabilities
can be significantly enhanced with advanced technology."

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."

A CIA representative would not answer questions, saying the agency's
policy is never to talk about funding. The two Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute researchers involved, Bulent Yener and Mukkai
Krishnamoorthy, did not respond to interview requests.

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
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev