TER General Board

Food for thought on chat rooms! Big brother is listening.
Gentleman Jim 3704 reads
posted

Is Big Brother Listening to Your Chat Room Conversations?

The U.S. government recently funded a study through the National Science Foundation to come up with a way to monitor conversations in online chat forums for signs of terrorist communications:
http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=041102ED-Study

The AP story on this by Michael Hill was picked up by just about every computer news outlet on the Web; if you do a Google search for "chat surveillance," you'll find dozens of hits quoting the article, along with various commentary.

Few would deny that the government should be doing whatever it can to detect and prevent future terrorist attacks, but such activities always raise a red flag for privacy advocates, who are concerned about the potential of a "slippery slope" that could lead to the use of tactics originally conceived as anti-terrorism tools to be expanded to be used against other criminals and, ultimately, the populace at large. Certainly, the idea of the FBI or CIA listening in on chat rooms could put a damper on discussions. Already, many folks are at the point where they're afraid to joke about certain subjects in e-mail for fear of misinterpretation if their messages should be intercepted.

Of course, chat room surveillance by law enforcement is nothing new. Police and federal agents have been using the practice for a long time to ferret out pedophiles and child pornographers. Often officers do much more than passively monitor the chats, setting up "stings" in which they pretend to be children or teenagers and attempt to lure the suspects into incriminating communications or in-person meetings. It's a widely accepted method of cracking down on this type of crime.

One can argue that you have no expectation of privacy in a public chat room that's open to everyone on the Internet. Others argue that if the government plans to monitor specific forums, that information should be made available to the users of those forums so that innocent parties could opt out. Of course, that would effectively negate the value of monitoring, since the not-so-innocent would be forewarned as well.

Back to the study: the research is geared toward constructing computer models that would analyze chat patterns and perhaps target key words to determine what conversations are likely to be terrorist communications, without having human beings actually listen/read the text of all the conversations. In theory, at least, this would tend to protect those engaged in innocent chatter and allow authorities to focus on only those exhibiting suspicious behavior.

The question comes down to this: how accurate will the software be? Computer programs are notoriously unable to distinguish such subtleties as sarcasm or humor. Will all chat participates need to start censoring themselves and avoiding any references or particular words that might be tagged by the system, in the same way one must refrain from saying "hi" to one's friend Jack in a busy airport? Is such self-censorship just the price we must pay for living in dangerous times, or is it an unacceptable infringement on free speech? Should be government stay out of our Internet communications - or should law enforcement agents work harder to mine all that data going over the public network to gather information to protect us from the bad guys?

ThePatriot2214 reads

Bush & Cheney are spending every last dollar in that shitastic sand-hole Iraq. LE will have to excercise literary skill and post multiple reviews to get free VIP chat-room access.  LE?...literary skill??...Isn't that an oxymoron?

Poopdeck Pappy2683 reads

Not to mention they have not yet hired enough translators to take on the task of trying to keep up with the terrorists,

I think the majority of the surveillance is being done to monitor for sexual predators. While TER may amuse them, I think they are more interested with trying to find the perverts going after underage kids.

dobie_doinat3115 reads

I wish I were as confident about the certainty of the situation.  Sometimes, when you aren't doing so well on the kiddy-predator front, it helps to have something around you can pad the statistics with.

d_d

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