:-)
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."
A really oldie, but goody:
ECHELON: the Global Surveillance System
ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network
CIA Patching ECHELON Shortcomings
Worldwide spying network is revealed - (Should we be complaining about Echelon?)
'ECHELON' WAS MY BABY
(NSA Echelon-Big Brother-All-Seeing Eye Is Watching) (Unprecedented) Privacy Warning Across Europe
What are those words that trigger Echelon?
EU Echelon Committee Calls for Increased Use of Encryption
U.S. to Close Eavesdropping Post [ECHELON]
Echelon Panel Calls It a Day
Japanese Newspaper Reports American Echelon Spy Activity
Echelon - Japanese diplomatic dispatches infiltrated by English-speaking spies
Bush facing EU condemnation over spy network (Echelon)
Echelon - When spies fall out
What is ECHELON?
How does ECHELON work?
Skeptics question scope of NSA’s information gathering with Echelon
Newspaper: Echelon Gave Authorities Warning Of Attacks
Did Echelon Overlook Terrorist Threat?
Echelon Gave Authorities Warning Of Attacks
Hunting Terrorists And Leaks(Echelon recorded terrorists -Nobody listened)
Precisely. Which is why those idiotic email "echelon spamming" things are so stupid. This is not some wanker-esque keyword matching scheme but sophisticated mathematics.
Incidentally, far slicker technology than semantic forests is under development in the US private sector. There have been some very interesting theoretical developments in the computational side of algorithmic information theory, which is the grand-daddy of all this stuff. People have no idea what kind of wicked ingenuity comes out of the US.
#newsgarden
Fast supercomputing systems are small. Memory latency matters A LOT for supercomputing codes of these types, and you can't get good latency at the clock speeds of today when your system is scattered hither and yon. Speed of light and all that.
They may have acres of systems, but they'll probably be racks of conventional systems for the most part, just like any other big data center. For better or worse, consumer grade crap is pretty close to the cutting edge of performance for this type of thing. The AMD64 systems being a glorious example of this.
I've learned lots about Islam on Paltalk also. I just wish I could understand what is being said in some of those Arabic speaking rooms. I'm sure they are monitoring those, and they should from what I've heard.
Whitfield Diffie is yer friend !
I think you're flacking for him, and it's not the first time it's crossed my mind.49 Posted on 02/29/2000 04:24:08 PST by metalbird1
Thanks for the ping!
Bingo:
"NSA and CIA are indeed so prohibited. However, there is no prohibition at law against NSA/CIA/USwhomever listening in/monitoring citizens of the UK ... and similarly there is no prohibition at law against MI6 listening in/monitoring citizens of the US."
"This curious little legal quirk has matured over the years into Echelon and related systems."
Then, throw the Mossad and KGB into this mix, and the Islamofascist trolls who use the internet as a communication or PR tool, could be in for a knock, knock game.
:-)
Perhaps NSA could design a 100% foolproof spam filter. Now that would be cool.
"Just as the robust law enforcement presence on the net caught Scott Ritter making a date with two minor girls, so it can intercept and prevent darker deeds.
"As long as they aren't after misspellers, FR has nothing to fear."
However, the Islamofascist Trolls who have used FR for communication, disinformation and PR tools, could have a whole lot to fear.
Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption
I'm with ya 100% on that one!
I figured you'd enjoy his work.........Stay safe !
I have yet to fail to identify a spam just by looking at its purported sender, the subject line, and the list of attachments if any. They are always clearly whimsical and/or come-onish. My ISP does a 99.8% good job of shutting this junk out, but it has also trashed some legitimate business email with people I have been corresponding with.
Maybe the reason the gummint backed off is that they invented a pretty good, dedicated purpose PGP cracking machine. The thorniest encryption can't prevent the correspondents themselves from getting sniffed out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.