U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Oct 12 11:16:20 PDT 2004


<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25272-2004Oct11?language=printer>

The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study


By Michael Hill
 The Associated Press
 Monday, October 11, 2004; 8:31 PM

 TROY, N.Y. -- 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 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 online 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.

Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like
assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the
sidewalk - virtually impossible.

Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent
Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter.
Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Yener will track the times that
messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic.

If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within
seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they
were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the
messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said.

In search of "hidden communities," Yener also wants to check messages for
certain keywords that could reveal something about what's being discussed
in groups.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches
to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the
nation's intelligence agencies.

The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal strictly
on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community
to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor the FBI would
comment on the grant, with a CIA spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of
sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the
Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But
it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and
coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection
Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat
rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used.
Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms' usefulness to terrorists
given the other current options, from Web mail to hiding messages on
designated Web pages that can only be seen by those who know where to look.

"In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on
a home page about tea cozies, I don't know whether if you're any better if
you think chat would be any particular magnet," Jonathan Zittrain, an
Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating
constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic,
experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in
search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they
are young teens.

But the idea of the government reviewing massive amounts of public
communications still raises some concerns.

Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit,
said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the
Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.

Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar
over its impact on privacy.

"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that
creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of
data is particularly private."

 ) 2004 The Asso
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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