Another nail in the coffin of privacy

CTV.ca | U.S. funds chat-room surveillance study

The US government is said to be funding research into the analysis of traffic in internet chat rooms in an attempt to determine who is directing their comments to whom without actually reading the traffic. An interesting idea. If it works, the system will create links showing how individual chat room users form themselves into sub-communities and relate to other such groupings.

This is only indirectly related to the problem of applying content analysis to chat room traffic in the way that Echelon does content analysis of international phone traffic. But it might help to cut down on the amount of computer power aimed at chat room traffic if it could focus on suspected groups rather than users who appear only intermittently.

The other thing this may assist with is the problem that, to the extent terrorists may be sending coded messages disguised as plain text, focusing on certain user groups could be immensely helpful in spotting such messages even if we don't know what they mean. On the other hand, we are likely to end up chasing a lot of false leads that will turn out to be region-specific teen slang in pseudo-English from kids in places like the Phillipines, Indonesia and Malaysia; or even Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Milwaukee.

We have the technology, it seems, to do anything except preserve our privacy. But someone else's government will probably be doing many of these things anyway, so why not our own?