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Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose 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."
Yener and Krishnamoorthy, both associate professors of computer science, wrote that their research would involve writing a program for "silently listening" to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and "logging all the messages." One of the oldest and most popular methods for chatting online, IRC attracts hundreds of thousands of users every day. A history written by IRC creator Jarkko Oikarinen said the concept grew out of chat technology for modem-based bulletin boards in the 1980s.
The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.
A June 2004 paper they published, also funded by the NSF, described a project that quietly monitored users of the popular Undernet network, which has about 144,000 users and 50,000 channels. In the paper, Yener and Krishnamoorthy predicted their work "could aid (the) intelligence community to eavesdrop in chat rooms, profile chatters and identify hidden groups of chatters in a cost-effective way" and that their future research will focus on identifying "topic-based information."
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"I don't know about chat-room surveillance, but doing research on issues related to terrorism is certainly legitimate," Teich said. "Whether the CIA ought to be funding research in universities in a clandestine manner is a different issue."
http://news.com.com/Security+officials+to+spy+on+chat+rooms+-+page+2/2100-7348_3-5466140-2.html?tag=st.num