Security officials to spy on chat rooms

Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 24 November 2004
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The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, CNET News.com has learned.

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 chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."

The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.

"I don't know about chat-room 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."

Oh yeah, slap a terrorist label on it and you can forget privacy. P2P supports terrorism: infiltrate them and sue users. Chatrooms make terrorism possible: develop monitoring systems and ignore the privacy of users. Encryption helps terrorism: cry for backdoors to encrypted data. Exactly that is why better applications are developed by users. They want their privacy. Now it's time for decentralized P2P chatsystems with 512bit encryption. Plus, the idea is in fact pretty pointless: DCC chats do not use the IRC server, so they cannot be monitored. So just switch to those if you want to discuss your newest nuking plans.