-Caveat Lector-
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- Begin Message ---
-Caveat Lector-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25272-2004Oct11.html
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."
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
<FONT COLOR="#000099">$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
</FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM";><B>Click
Here!</B></A>
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
-__ ___ _ ___ __ ___ _ _ _ __
/-_|-0-\-V-/-\|-|-__|-|-|-/-_|
\_-\--_/\-/|-\\-|-_||-V-V-\_-\
|__/_|--//-|_|\_|___|\_A_/|__/
SPY NEWS is OSINT newsletter and discussion list associated to
Mario's Cyberspace Station - The Global Intelligence News Portal
http://mprofaca.cro.net
######## CAUTION! #########
Since you are receiving and reading documents, news stories,
comments and opinions not only from so called (or self-proclaimed)
"reliable sources", but also a lot of possible misinformation collected
by Spy News moderator and subscribers and posted to Spy News
for OSINT purposes - it should be a serious reason (particularly to
journalists and web publishers) to think twice before using it for their
story writing, further publishing or forwarding throughout Cyberspace.
To unsubscribe:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE: This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Spy News is making it available
without profit to SPY NEWS eGroup members who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques,
human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues,
for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of
the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
-----------------------------------------------
SPY NEWS home page:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spynews
Mario Profaca
http://mprofaca.cro.net/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spynews/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- End Message ---
