Government Funds Chat Room Surveillance Research

By Michael Hill Associated Press Writer
Published: Oct 11, 2004

"TROY, N.Y. (AP) - 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."

Does anyone really think this is something new and just started?

How many news stories over the past several years about sex rings being broken have we read. Over the past year, it seems to be at least one every two months. The story line is always the same. "Some asshole whose wife is not giving him any" goes online to a chat room, meets "Sexy Betty 15-year old" who just cannot wait to have her itch scratched. They converse online, and "some asshole whose wife is not giving him any" starts to fantasize about miss young, nubile, and willing "Sexy Betty 15-year old". Over a couple of months, "Sexy Betty 15-year old" convinces him to meet her to do some real live scratching across states lines, and BAM! "Some asshole whose wife is not giving him any" is now on his way to meet the police for a long stay in the pokey, and maybe suicide, for his disturbing thoughts.

Or, "some fed-up patriot" finally has had enough and starts cruising the "patriot sites", boards, forums and chat rooms and meets online someone who is voicing the "patriots" frustration, they start talking, discuss the bastards in the swamp, start making plans to fight back, maybe discussing the assembly and storage of household supplies in the proper proportions and BAM! "Some fed-up patriot" is now on his way to meet the police for a long stay in the pokey, and maybe suicide, for his disturbing thoughts.

Or, you do not even have to go online for this kind of disgusting activities to take place, there is always the 1-800-Turn-In-Your-Neighbor telephone numbers, for those that just cannot stand to know that others may actually have different thoughts, opinions, ideas, or hell even a better time than they are having.

Of course, this is now being trumpeted as another tool in Homeland Security. I despise the use of this phrase for it is just to damn close to Rodina and Der Fatherland.

Many who now embrace this concept, only a few short years ago were railing against our government committed atrocities right here in the old "homeland". Each of the measures passed since September 11^th, 2001 were fought tooth and nail against by these same people who now consider them O.K. simply because the Republicrats are currently holding the keys.

I believe Robert Anson Heinlein called them Mrs. Grundy, and others throughout history called them the "Thought Police".

I simply call them the tools of tyrants...

--WP