This story was printed from ZDNet UK, located at http://news.zdnet.co.uk/

Story URL:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39175016,00.htm

CIA funds chatroom surveillance
Declan McCullagh
CNET News.com
November 25, 2004, 08:35 GMT

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."

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************