Security Officials To Spy On Chat Rooms

KingFishKingFish
edited December 2004 in Science & Tech
The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms 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 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."
Source: c|net

Comments

  • EMTEMT Seattle, WA Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    So... every one of us using AIM or whatever might have a Big Brother potential-terrorist online profile based on our conversations? That would be freaky.
  • Burrito
    edited November 2004
    Ofcourse there is a profile based on your usage and conversations style. There's also those photos they took through your monitor using the xrays.
  • jonh doe
    edited December 2004
    All the CIA has to do is go to Yahoo politicla chatrooms and they can see for themselves that there is a BIG problem in America. The level of "Conversation" is abominable.
  • jonh doe
    edited December 2004
    All the CIA has to do is go to Yahoo political chatrooms and they can see for themselves that there is a BIG problem in America. The level of "Conversation" is abominable. Sorry about the spelling mistake in the comment posted above. :)
  • SchWartzSchWartz
    edited December 2004
    Two pretty well publicized efforts include:
    --A private company that crawls the web on behalf of banking clients (whose names and logos have been spoofed in phishing scams, like Citibank, SunTrust, etc) looking for carding sites (for trade in credit card numbers) or trade in zombie bots. Here's a story from the register about a carding site taken down in October by secret service: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/operation_firewall/
    And here's the post-arrest carding site: http://www.shadowcrew.com/
    You need to use IE to get the full amusing effect (there's a wav file that will load).

    --Also, the dopes who trade in child porn are trackable online since they leave a bread crumb trail of pixels behind them.
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