That is what the US government hopes to find out from a study on internet chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism programme, reports ABC.
The year-long programme, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor Bulent Yener, would try to uncover the structure within the free-wheeling and wide-ranging interactions in chat rooms, where every subject under the sun is discussed by a few million people every day, mostly under assumed nicknames.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.
Given the incredible diversity of subjects under discussion at any given time, Yener 'hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums,' ABC said.
The grant is aimed at making chat room surveillance fully automated.
After downloading data from various chat rooms, he will try to create a 'statistical profile of the traffic' and check for 'certain keywords
"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener, who has already developed software for collecting data from chat rooms, was quoted as saying.
'The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the nation's intelligence agencies,' ABC said.
The grant outline describes chat rooms as being "particularly vulnerable for exploitation by malicious parties." According to Red Herring, one excerpt from the grant offers a scenario where an "adversary (uses) a teenager chat room to plan a terrorist act."
Neither the CIA nor the FBI would comment on the grant.
Experts said the government is not violating any constitutional right since the study would focus on public chat rooms. "Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they are young teens," the report said.
