CIA Researching Automated IRC Spying

Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of '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.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."

Isn't IM monitored already

[Anonymous Coward]

ICQ is owned by Odigo, an Israeli company.

Heh

[FiReaNGeL]

So basically they received 150k to develop a logging bot? Not that it existed for the past 10 years... I sure hope their technology is more sophisticated than that. Even then, I don't think they'll get usefull info monitoring public chat rooms; its not like terrorists go to #terrorism to chat about their next plan.

No expectation of privacy

[3Suns]

I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy. And it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.

IM conversations are a different matter, though. There, the network is private, run by a company, and the expectation is that the conversations are private as well. It might very well be illegal for AOL (and other IM networks) to be monitoring individual IM sessions.

Re:Juristiction?

[Gharlane of Eddore]

Legally (theoretically) (yeah right) they are ONLY allowed to spy on foreign citizens/governments. The CIA jurisdiction is supposedly restricted to outside the borders of the U.S. (If those foreign governments/citizens object to being spied on by the U.S. it is up to them to try and obstruct such spying (counter-espionage)). The FBI has the jurisdiction for spying within the borders of the U.S.

Re:Eliza anyone?

[stratjakt]

Sure, there are plenty of them.

Here's [jibble.org] the first google hit for "irc bot ai", there are plenty more.

I don't think they're useful, but they can be entertaining when some leghumping 15 year old kid gets into a fight with, or hits on one.

Bing!Bing!Bing!

[TiggertheMad]

Correct, at least as far as public rumors about secret government spying software goes. However, the Carnivore project is FBI. The FBI doesn't work for the CIA, so why would you expect them to actually work together?

Also, technically, the FBI are just federal cops, as opposed to state cops or local cops. The CIA is an intelligence agency (spies), and so they might not want the exact same sort of application. You can't simply get a court order to slap Carnivore on an ISP's lines when the ISP in question is say, in North Korea.

Re:It wont really be any good...

[ArbitraryConstant]

Using SSL or SSH to encrypt the communications is trivial.

you forgot about encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Most ircds I've used have built-in SSL support, and all you have to do is make encrypted connections a requirement for getting onto the network, and you'll be fine (until your encryption gets broken). I might add that quite a few ircds will also mask your IP address, so it'd take a court order (or a secret national security letter) to get ahold of that.

Re:It wont really be any good...

[toastee]

I can say that this is completly backwards, as the traffic between the ircd's is ziped and ssl encrypted, and the connections to the clients CAN be SSL as well. At least that's the way it is on a private IRC network I spend time on. (One of the networks 4 servers lives under my desk). As an option you can set a flag on an irc channel to only allow clients with encryption enabled to join the conversation. The only people this is going to catch are the ones stupid or lazy enough to deserve catching.

Re:You don't control the trunks

[Eil]

Yeah, but you don't have physical control over the pipes between yor server and all your clients. How do you think your bits get sent back and forth? I just have to put an intercept between you and your clients to grab all the data I want.

OpenSSL [openssl.org]. Many IRCds and clients these days support encryption.

This would be some sort of program that can sit on an ISP's trunks, and grab all traffic that looked like IRC traffic and dump it in a log. Since it is the CIA, (And they are in theory, the Intelligence 'Offense') it might be a small embedded hardware solution that has a built in microdrive. It would be very handy to have a CIA controled operative slip in to a NOC in a hostile country, snap it onto a trunk in an unobtrusice location and pick it up a month later.

They already have this, it's called Carnivore. It's not a secret from the ISPs, either, they know it's there. But they are prohibited by law from telling the public whether or not a Carnivore box is monitoring their traffic. Additionally, Carnivore is not only for email these days.

Re:It wont really be any good...

[dougmc]

[IRC traffic ... encrypted]

At least that's the way it is on a private IRC network I spend time on.

Well, it's not that way in the major networks (Efnet, Undernet, IRCnet, Dalnet at least.) Sure, you could set up DCC to use SSL or some other form of encryption to talk to your friends, but unless you go out of your way to use encryption, nothing is encrypted.

It's cute that the CIA is just looking into this now. I think it was 1990 or so that Avalon (?) was caught logging PRIVMSG traffic on a server on his network. Sniffing the network and putting it into human readable format, and then grepping that for `interesting' stuff, is *extremely* simple when you have access to the network.