CIA funds monitoring of IRC

Under an agreement obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA agreed to fund research projects on the Q.T., through the National Science Foundation.

According to a report on ZDNet UK, money has been recieved by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. One of its proposals received almost $158,000 in grants, which will enable it to build a program for 'silently listening' to IRC channels and logging messages. The two men behind the proposal, Bulent Yener and Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, state in a paper released back in June that their work 'could aid [the] intelligence community to eavesdrop in chatrooms, profile chatters and identify hidden groups of chatters in a cost-effective way'.

As much as we wish that this was one big wind-up, we can't help but worry that this is, in fact, legit. The research proposal mentions monitoring the Undernet network: far from being the hive of terrorists that the CIA might think, all they're likely to catch in there are song-and-movie-swappers. Although, with the current hold the record and movie industries have over the politics of the US, one has to wonder if that isn't an incidental benefit.

We wonder how far the chat spies will be able to decode the language to profile chatters. Here's a headstart for the chaps: "OMG HL2 PWNZ WTF BBQ !!! 111" will signify hardcore gamers. µ