Briefs

Associated Press (10/11/04); Hill, Michael

The National Science Foundation has awarded a one-year, $157,673 grant to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor Bulent Yener to develop mathematical models that can extract patterns from the traffic of public online chat rooms, which could help determine whether such forums are being used by terrorists. Yener will download data from selected chat rooms and build a statistical profile of the traffic by tracking the times that messages were sent.

He says the goal of the project is to uncover the identity of chat-room correspondents without actually reading their communications. Another goal of Yener's is to ascertain the subjects of group discussions by checking chat-room messages for specific keywords. The monitoring of traffic on public chat rooms does not circumvent constitutional rights to privacy, according to experts. Still, former director of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit Mark Rasch thinks such a system is another step toward the Pentagon's infamous Terrorism Information Awareness data-mining program. However, some cybersecurity experts doubt that chat-room surveillance would be a very effective countermeasure, given that terrorists can resort to more secretive means of online communication.

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