U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study

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U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study
By MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/ 
RTGAM.20041012.gtchatoct12/BNStory/Technology/
___________

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.
<snip>

---------------------------------
Osama, R U there?
The U.S. Intelligence Community funds ways to spy on chat rooms.
http://www.redherring.com/article.aspx?a=10855&hed=Osama%2C+R+U+there%3F

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).
<snip>


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