US to spy on chatrooms

TROY (New York): Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chatrooms -- flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks -- are terrorists plotting their next move?

The US Government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a year-long study on chatroom surveillance under an anti-terrorism programme.

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums.

Chatrooms 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 (www.pewinternet.org) estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chatrooms.

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 chatrooms, he 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 chatroom, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chatroom.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," said Yener (www.cs.rpi.edu/~yener/).

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.

CIA, FBI keep mum

The US$157,673 (about RM600,000) grant comes from the National Science Foundation's (www.nsf.gov) Approaches to Combat Terrorism programme. 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 spokesman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaeda 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 chatrooms for planning and coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Centre and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chatrooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used.

Other cybersecurity experts doubted chatrooms' usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from webmail to hiding messages on designated webpages 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 homepage 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.

No rights in cyberspace

Since they are focusing on public chatrooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, said experts (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/" http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/).

Law enforcement agents have trawled chatrooms for years in search of paedophiles, 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 programme.

Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy (www.epic.org/).

"It's the ability to gather and analyse massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private." -- AP