- Are you chatting on IRC? You never know who might be
watching...
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- The CIA is quietly funding federal research into
surveillance
of internet chatrooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists,
newly released documents reveal.
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- 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 behaviour
of chatroom users.
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- 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 silicon.com sister site CNET News.com.
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- NSF programme director Leland Jameson said on 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."
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- The NSF grant for chatroom 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 11 September,
2001 attacks and the fight against terrorism presented US spy agencies
with surveillance challenges, existing spy "capabilities can be
significantly
enhanced with advanced technology".
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- 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 US," Rotenberg said.
"You have to be careful that the National Science Foundation doesn't
become the National Spy Foundation."
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- 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.
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- 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 chatroom as a silent
listener
for eavesdropping... The proposed system could aid the intelligence
community
to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chatrooms
without human intervention."
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- 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 for chatting online, IRC attracts hundreds of thousands of users
every day. A history written by IRC creator Jarkko Oikarinen said the
concept
grew out of chat technology for modem-based bulletin boards in the
1980s.
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- The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research
will begin 1 January, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be
monitored.
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- A June 2004 paper 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 chatrooms, 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".
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- Al Teich, director of science and policy programmes at
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said he does not
object to the CIA funding terrorism-related research in general.
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- "I don't know about chatroom 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."
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- Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com.
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- http://www.silicon.com/0,39024729,39126120,00.htm
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