I'd be surprised if someone wasn't monitoring us and all the others.
Posted on 11/28/2004 8:48:51 PM PST by Prime Choice
A university in New York has been funded to keep tabs on IRC conversations with money channelled through the National Science Foundation by the CIA, documents have revealed.
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.
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.
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 ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.
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."
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".
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."
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 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."
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.
The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin 1 January, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.
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."
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.
"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."
BMFL...
Hi CIA, hope yall are doing ok.
I'm sure they are, I read a post there some months ago, about one of the posters admitting to have been visited by the FBI for what he posted!!!!
Huh?
bump! bump! bump!
As if the goobers at the CIA aren't already in on all of the teen chat rooms already...
Dude...
I'd be surprised if someone wasn't monitoring us and all the others.
As long as they aren't after misspellers, FR has nothing to fear.haha! My worst sin is usually typos!! haha!
Hope I don't get busted! :^D
We're doing fine, thanks. How are the wife and ki--
Errr...I mean, move on, citizen! Nothing to see here!
Greylisting seems to be the way to go. I've been using the TMDA greylist system (utilizes both blacklists and whitelists) and my spam volume has dropped from 200+ a day to just 3 in the past 7 months.
I want the good guys to protect us. Why on earth would we want to "jam" them? And yes, I was here at the time.
Pretty logical really until you think... HELL OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN, ALL OF THEM.. Why pussyfoot around with Chatt rooms.. unless its a vector for terrorists and other democrats(mob rule) to communicate for FREE over the internet when OUT of the country..
:^)
Do you actually believe they wouldn't share information? Do you actually believe the CIA doesn't conduct ops in the US? We've got more spy agencies and government spooks running around than a dog has fleas. They had huge funding and manpower and satellites and computers BEFORE 9/11 and they still screwed the pooch. More power isn't the answer.
The violent anti-Muslim bigots who post here ought to fear.
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