Never mind the flirty phrasing between RdHtMa and Ht2Trt in the Internet chat world – Uncle Sam is more interested in whether the bad guys are in there plotting the next major terrorist attack, and he's even willing to pony up over $100,000 to study the prospect, by way of a yearlong study of chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.
The funding – an estimated $157,673 grant from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program – reportedly will go to help a Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor, Bulent Yener, who is said to hope for developing mathematical models uncovering some sort of structure in the near-anarchic online chat world.
Usually, Internet chatters chat about things as wide ranging as love, politics, Dostoevski, dating, school, and music, but online chat rooms are also just as well known as playgrounds for hackers and crackers to trade tools of the trade, from programming codes to stolen passwords and credit numbers.
Yener said he thinks math models in search of patterns in the chattering could help him create statistical profiles from those patterns, trace particular keywords that might reveal discussion subjects or intentions, and even find hidden communities behind the communities – including, possibly, communities in which plots for future terrorist attacks might be scripted and disseminated to the designated attackers.
The NSF said the Yener proposal was judged solely on broader scientific merit, adding it would be left to the U.S. intelligence community to determine any national security value, though neither the CIA nor the FBI commented yet on the grant.
Cybersecurity experts seem mostly willing to give the Yener project a chance to succeed on merit, particularly given al-Qaeda, for one, having a small reputation for using the Internet to keep contact within the group.
But some, like Harvard Law School Internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain, say they don't know just how much if any intelligence value might be gleaned from Internet chats, particularly with terrorists also believed using email and hidden codes in designated Web pages to be seen only by those in their groups or their allies.
"In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on a home page about tea cozies," Zittrain told a reporter, "I don't know whether if you're any better if you think chat would be any particular magnet."
There are some civil liberties concerns about a project like Yener’s. While online chats are usually public, the idea of the government financing such a review has a few worries. Former Justice Department computer crimes chief Mark Rasch thinks it could help get the U.S. government a step closer to a new take on an old and much maligned proposal – the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness data-mining program, attacked for being too grave a potential invasion of privacy.
