U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study (Hello Agent Mike!)

[matcom]

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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.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&u=/ap/20041012/ap_on_hi_te/chat_room_surveillance_3&printer=1

[Moderator]

1. Duplicate

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=898400