[Air-l] FW: [chineseinternetresearch] National Science Foundation to help CIA spy on IRC chatrooms

Sun Nov 28 12:14:28 PST 2004

What makes you think that they don't come to these things?  Intelligence 
agencies from every nation try to keep up with new development and academic 
conferences would seem like a perfect opportunity to do that.  While we 
tend to equate intelligence with James Bond and the like, a lot of what 
intelligence agencies do is the same thing that we do--analyze data. Why 
wouldn't they want our take on all of this? John McNutt

On Sunday, November 28, 2004 1:14 PM, Charles Ess [SMTP:ess at uni-trier.de] 
wrote:
| So shall we invite the CIA to the next AoIR conference? (smile)
|
| In seriousness, I thought this report would be of considerable to many
| Airists who know something about chatroom research and how easy it is to
| profile users... (_not_ smiling this time...)
|
| Charles Ess
| Fall '04: Fulbright Senior Scholar
| Universitat Trier
| Fachbereich II
| Fakultaten der Medienwissenschaft, Sinologie
| Universitatsring 15
| 54296 Trier (Germany)
| Office phone: (49) (0)651-201-3744
|  Sekretariat: (49) (0)651-201-3203
|          Fax: (49) (0)651-201-3741
|
| Distinguished Research Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
| Drury University
| 900 N. Benton Ave.              Voice: 417-873-7230
| Springfield, MO  65802  USA       FAX: 417-873-7435
|
| Home page:  http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
| Co-chair, CATaC: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac/
|
| Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23
|
|
| ------ Forwarded Message
| From: George Lessard <media at web.net>
| Reply-To: <chineseinternetresearch at yahoogroups.com>
| Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 10:05:50 -0700
| To: Chinese Internet Research List 
<chineseinternetresearch at yahoogroups.com>
| Cc: L mediamentor <mediamentor at yahoogroups.com>
| Subject: [chineseinternetresearch] National Science Foundation to help 
CIA
| spy on IRC chatrooms
|
| 
<http://management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,39126120,00.htm>htt  
p://
| management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,39126120,00.htm
|
| CIA checks out chatrooms
| November 25 2004
| by Declan McCullagh
|
| [Excerpts]
|
| 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 silicon.com sister site CNET News.com.
|
| 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.
|
| 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".
|
| 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".
|
|
|
| --
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