Internet Spying

[Zlatko Waterman]

Perhaps John Ashcroft himself will soon be "looking into" the minds of the creative types hanging around here at StudioEight?

Perhaps he can post a list of rules for "wholesome" thoughts?

--Z

(paste)


Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 by the Associated Press


Bush Funds US Spying on Internet Chat Rooms
by Michael Hill

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.


CYBERSNOOP ( picture caption)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor Bulent Yener poses in his office in Troy, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 30, 2004, with a map created by Bell Labs of the major Internet Service Providers as they existed on Aug. 19, 1999. Yener wants to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure in the scattershot traffic of chat rooms. (AP Photo/Jim McKnight)

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 (yener@cs.rit.edu) 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.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said.

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.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. 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 spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaida 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 chat rooms for planning and coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used. Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms' usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from Web mail to hiding messages on designated Web pages 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 home page 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.

Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, 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 program.

Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy.

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

© Copyright 2004 Associated Press

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[abcrystcats]

"RPI professor Bulent Yener" .... is this a REAL person ???

Har har har !!! Good luck to them, whether they exist or not ...

"Yener wants to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure in the scattershot traffic of chat rooms"

A mathematical model ???

If he succeeds (Dr. Fictitious Yener of RPI) we will be developing new languages to confound him. We are already doing that, anyway. But ... sadly, he probably won't succeed and Dr. Bulent Yener will be filing for other superfluous grants to waste more taxpayers money on other far-fetched ideas.

I am trembling in my internet shoes ...

[Lightning Rod]

Yeah Zlatko, we've got to stop meeking like this.
They'll think we are a terrorist cell.

I'm sure they have their software engineers at work on this
you know, bots that detect all unsavory thought.

four technicians in the Dept. of Justice
will be able to keep tabs on us all

everything you post on the internet
is a pre-trial deposition.

watch what you say.

[abcrystcats]

Sorry,lLRod, my paranoid instincts go pretty far.

In fact, some day soon, they WILL begin regulatory monitoring of internet communications. But first, they have to CONTROL it. This Bulent Yener whatever and his "mathematical theories" can't do much, if it can do ANYTHING.

If these guys want REAL control of the internet, then they will have to do what they have already done with cars and drivers -- regulate it, license the HELL out of it -- and cover it with paperwork. That is the only way. Just my opinion.

[knip]

but really


as many of you know, i am an o-f-f-c-e-r in the canadian n-a-v-y

i often leave myself widely exposed by what i say...partly because i need honest forums to keep me 'real' and partly because i believe in freedom

i want to advance to a certain point in my career (command) because this has been the focus of my work for over 20 years

and i believe it important work


so i know certain things, such as phrases like 'data-mining' and 'knowledge management' have real implications



the establishment has stupid words for things, but the reasons for actions and the facts behind grammar are often important


i just think we pooh-pooh things because of how they


sound too often..................

[Lightning Rod]

I don't think they'll be able to contro the net
unless they have rooms full of monkeys reading every word.


that's why the internet is built for crime
nothing is more criminal than ideas

not theft or rape or murder
sixty keystrokes can do them more harm
than a bannana clip full of 9mm shells

[abcrystcats]

OK, well sorry.

I have no doubt that if someone wanted to check YOU out, personally, Knip, they could do it. The internet is filled with avenues for checking out INDIVIDUALS. I think it's really disgusting and an invasion of privacy. Even if you have never posted to the internet in your life, the internet has posted on YOU, and you're vulnerable.

If you want to get really paranoid, I feel sure that the company I worked for last year tapped my phone at some point and certainly any computer communications I made were also monitored. I don't think the monitoring was VIGOROUS, but it was easy to do, and so they did it.

So, Knip, if your Navy wanted to check you out, they would. If you're an officer, they surely are. Sorry, but you wanted confirmation. I have no proof, but only instincts.

As for using the internet to IDENTIFY subversives ... I really think that's outside the realms of mathematics. The only way to do it is by making people PAY for internet use and then dividing by regions.

The best response to all this is something along the lines of " F**K YOU!" and saying whatever you want on the internet anyways. But ... people are cowards they won't do that ...

[Lightning Rod]

knip--

If they ever did a comprehensive search on me
they would have all the confessions they need
to lock me up forever in the deepest part of the hive.

I agree with Cat
get it all out there
come and get me, coppah

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear LR and all:

This little tale may make you glance over your shoulder: (!?)

--Z


McCarthyism Watch
Secret Service Calls on Owner of "King George" Sign

by Matthew Rothschild

Secret Service Calls on Owner of "King George" Sign



It was August 26, and Derek Kjar, 19, was in the backyard of his home in Salt Lake City stringing up plants in his garden.

He got a voice mail message on his cell phone, so he decided to check it.

"Derek, this is Agent Kim from the U.S. Secret Service, and I need to speak to you as soon as possible. Please call me." Kim left his number, Kjar says.

"At first, I thought it was a joke," Kjar says. "My friend Marisa said, in jest, that they were trying to flag all the gay people in America." Kjar is gay.

He called his mother, and she told him to call the man back in the morning.

That's what he did.

"Agent Kim answered," Kjar recalls. "He asked me where I was. I said I was at work. He said he'd be right there. I asked what it was about. And he said he couldn't disclose that over the phone."

Kjar works at his parents' dry cleaners. He waited there until a silver Grand Am pulled up to the shop, and two agents came out: Agent Kim and another man, Kjar says.

"Before we knew it, my stepdad was gone out back talking to the agents," Kjar says. "When my stepdad came back, they said they wanted to talk to me alone."

Kjar followed them out back.

"When I went out there, they said they had a call from my neighbor about a sticker on my car," he says. "And right then, I knew exactly what they were talking about: It was a graphic I had printed off a website on my computer, and I just taped it on to my car with scotch tape. It said: KING GEORGE-Off With His Head."

The agents asked Kjar where the sticker was, so he took them out to his car. "I opened up the door and got it off the seat and handed it to them," he says. "They asked why it wasn't on the window anymore, and I said the sun had melted it off."

Then they got down to brass tacks.

"They started addressing me about how it could be a threat," he says. "They said it was 'borderline terrorism.' "

"Isn't that sort of bullshit? Doesn't that take my freedom of speech away?"

No, the agents said, repeating the "borderline terrorism" charge, Kjar says.

The agents then went inside with Kjar, and they interrogated him alone for another forty minutes, he says.

"They asked me if I was serious about making a threat to the President," he says. "And I said no, the only thing I was hoping to do was get a few people a little ticked off at me or maybe get another vote for Kerry."

The questions continued.

"They asked if I had ever made a threat to the President, or ever written to the President or contacted him in any way or ever met him," he says.

"I said no, I had better things to do with my time.

"Then they asked me if I had ever studied assassination or terrorism, or the former assassination of other government officials, or ever read books in school about it, or done any school projects on it.

"I told them no, I hadn't.

"They asked if I had been in the military or any type of a militia groups.

"I was kind of baffled about that. 'No, no, no, not even close, way off.' "

To Kjar's relief, his mother finally arrived.

"When my mother walked into the room, both agents stood up and puffed their chest out and said you can't be in here. And my mother said, 'I don't give a shit. He's my son.'

So she just sat right next to me and waited with me."

Then they probed his political affiliations.

"They asked me, 'Are you a part of an equal rights organization or blah or blah or any group opposed to the President?"

And then they got personal, he says.

"They started asking me about my relationship with my roommates," he says. "And whether I went out to clubs. They asked whether I smoke, or drank, or took drugs. Then they started asking about my physical characteristics: If blond was my natural hair color, if I wore contacts, and if had any identifying marks, like tattoos, moles, and scars, and where they were or what they were from, and whether I had ever had any plastic surgery."

When they were done with the questioning, the agents had an assignment for Kjar.

"They asked me to write a statement about the sticker, why I got the sticker, where, how, and why I put it up," he says.

He complied. "It was about a page and a half," he says. "They made me sign it. Basically, I said I found it on the Internet, I thought it was funny, and it was a little edgier than most that I'd seen, so I printed it up and put it in my car hoping to get a few laughs."

Before they left, they took three photographs of Kjar, he says, and they warned him: "Do not post or print or hand out the sticker again."

Kjar feels that his rights were violated. "I've almost lost my freedom of speech," he says. "I make one statement, and I get shot down, while everyone is out there with their bumper stickers and signs."

Kjar suspects that his neighbors with Bush stickers all over their car turned him in. "They won't even speak to us," he says. "Since the incident, the police have been over at my neighbors' house several times. For a while, I just felt trapped. I didn't want to leave my house because I thought my neighbors would hassle me. Or if we had a party at my house, the neighbors might report us."

The Secret Service office in Salt Lake City would not comment on the story, except to say that Lon Garner of the Denver office would be answering any questions.

"The inference of a veiled threat is what we look at," Special Agent Garner says. "That's exactly what that was. By law, we investigate all those types of threats. We present those to the U.S. attorney. A veiled threat will always be investigated by the Secret Service. That's what we do. Always."

Garner was incredulous at the suggestion of an infringement on civil liberties.

"How could his freedom of speech be violated would be my question," he says.

Dani Eyer, executive director of the ACLU, offers an explanation. "It would take an extreme imagination on the part of the Secret Service to consider this sign as an imminent threat," Eyer says. "Anybody with any familiarity with the Declaration of Independence or the Revolutionary War would know that 'Off With His Head' was political hyperbole."

Eyer says the Secret Service has an obligation to investigate threats, but also an obligation to take context into consideration and to assess intent. Eyer adds that it was "inappropriate for the Secret Service to confiscate" Kjar's sign.

While he was intimidated at first, Kjar says he isn't anymore.

"I've gotten a lot of support from people who share my opinions or even support Bush but believe that it was uncool that they went after me."

He says he may return to posting signs.

"I've been kind of considering making some T-shirts or actual bumper stickers," he says. "What can they do to me except keep taking my sticker away? I'm not a threat."

© 2004 The Progressive

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[abcrystcats]

The kind of intimidation described in this post is becoming more and more common. It is not just the government taking part in these tactics. Large corporations are beginning to apply similar methods. Be prepared. The more totalitarian the United States of America gets, the more important it will be for us all to toe the line, or else.