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CIA Researching Automated IRC Spying
Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of '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.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."
So basically they received 150k to develop a logging bot? Not that it existed for the past 10 years... I sure hope their technology is more sophisticated than that. Even then, I don't think they'll get usefull info monitoring public chat rooms; its not like terrorists go to #terrorism to chat about their next plan.
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I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy. And it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
IM conversations are a different matter, though. There, the network is private, run by a company, and the expectation is that the conversations are private as well. It might very well be illegal for AOL (and other IM networks) to be monitoring individual IM sessions.
-3Suns
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The Revolution will be Slashdotted
I can say that this is completly backwards, as the traffic between the ircd's is ziped and ssl encrypted, and the connections to the clients CAN be SSL as well. At least that's the way it is on a private IRC network I spend time on. (One of the networks 4 servers lives under my desk). As an option you can set a flag on an irc channel to only allow clients with encryption enabled to join the conversation. The only people this is going to catch are the ones stupid or lazy enough to deserve catching.
- Better to speak your mind than to remain silent, or someone may speak for you.
Yeah, but you don't have physical control over the pipes between yor server and all your clients. How do you think your bits get sent back and forth? I just have to put an intercept between you and your clients to grab all the data I want.
OpenSSL. Many IRCds and clients these days support encryption.
This would be some sort of program that can sit on an ISP's trunks, and grab all traffic that looked like IRC traffic and dump it in a log. Since it is the CIA, (And they are in theory, the Intelligence 'Offense') it might be a small embedded hardware solution that has a built in microdrive. It would be very handy to have a CIA controled operative slip in to a NOC in a hostile country, snap it onto a trunk in an unobtrusice location and pick it up a month later.
They already have this, it's called Carnivore. It's not a secret from the ISPs, either, they know it's there. But they are prohibited by law from telling the public whether or not a Carnivore box is monitoring their traffic. Additionally, Carnivore is not only for email these days.