At 05:41 AM 9/15/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

NSF Award Abstract - #0442154

Yeah, this is Science (snicker)...

Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities

Abstract The aim of this proposal is to develop new techniques for information gathering, analysis and modeling of chatroom communications. First, the

investigator and his colleague consider graph-less models to capture the structure of chatroom communications. In particular, the investigators study how to develop a multidimensional singular value decomposition

approach for component analysis of chatroom communication data. Second,

buzzword alert the

investigators develop new visualisation techniques to display the

buzzword alert

structural information found in the first step.

Internet chatrooms provide an interactive and public forum of communication for participants with diverse objectives. Two properties of chatrooms make them particularly vulnerable for exploitation by malicious parties. First, the real identities of the participants are decoupled from their chatroom nicknames.

As if email doesn't share that property? You really think I work for cdc.gov? Second, multiple threads of communication can

co-exist concurrently.

What a fucking concept... Although human-monitoring of each chatroom to

determine "who-is-chatting-with-whom" is possible, it is very time consuming, hence not scalable. Thus, it is very easy to conceal malicious behavior in Internet chatrooms and use them for covert communications (e.g., adversary using a teenager chatroom to plan a terrorist act).

How about teenagers planning terrorist attacks? Or terrorists' senior proms? This

project aims at a fully automated surveillance system for data

collection >and analysis in Internet chatrooms to discover hidden groups.

Use textual stego, mofo. Thus, the proposed system could

aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chatrooms without human intervention.

A pretty good argument for broadcast stego.

This award is supported jointly by the NSF and the Intelligence Community.

I bet. They already 0wn the fucking IX points, and can grab the DHCP records; don't you think the spooks already do this, and more? Look at Orion Sci, which graphs gangs. Extrapolate to IP. If these bozos were better they wouldn't be in Troy.