There are some thoughts I had when I read this article:

“Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk — virtually impossible.”

Sure that it’s virtually impossible but the question is: Is this legal? It’s another question with many more sense.

“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.”

Is the program will only be used for terrorists? Let me doubt about this.

“Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it’s not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination.”

Will they put a “carnivore” program on every chat server of every programs availed on the internet and private ones programmed by Joe in his basement? Or will they put a bot on every channel they know of? If so, how will they intercept private conversations? If so, what will stop terrorists to create their own protocols and programs (possibly encrypted) to communicate between them? It’s a non-sense

“Because they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they are young teens.”

In this case it’s probably a better idea to do cyber-infiltration of some terrorist groups than filtering traffic.

Seriously, do they really think that terrorists are as silly as they wish? Two things, or they take their dreams for reality (what I doubt) or they put another thing on the shoulders of terrorists to get budgets. It’s sure that terrorists are a world wide problem, but what I see now is that they use them to try to resolve other problems by the side. What thinker of law enforcement agencies are thinking about? Probably not what you think…

Seriously, they can’t think of things like this to arm terrorist organizations, it’s impossible. Go Infiltrate them; return back in the playground; stop losing your time in the cyberspace to try to stop terrorists…