I’ve been fascinated by scandal over the past week regarding a story on 60 Minutes in which Dan Rather showed some supposedly newly-discovered documents that had been discovered that were damaging to Bush’s service record while he served in the National Guard. Over the past few days there has been a growing body of evidence to suggest that the documents used in the 60 Minutes story were forged. While it hasn’t been proved 100% to anyone’s satisfaction, enough questions have been raised about the authenticity of these documents that CBS is widely being criticized for basing their news story on these documents.

There are aspects of this emerging story that are relevant to all of us who care about privacy and technology, regardless of how we feel about Dan Rather and CBS and regardless of how we feel about the upcoming elections.

It’s amazing to see how quickly the facts surrounding these documents were investigated and how quickly serious questions about these documents were raised by web loggers and other interested people on the Internet. For a good summary of the chronology of events immediately following the story see

The NSF (National Science Foundation) is funding a project, entitled “Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities “.

From the award abstract, it appears as though the researchers intend to develop an automated surveillance system that will collect data in Internet chatrooms to discover hidden groups in which possible terrorist activities might be discussed. The system would automatically determine who is chatting with whom as well as specific topics that are being discussed in chatrooms by specific chat room participants. Unfortunately, the abstract does not mention how the PIs will investigate the social impact of such technologies; nor does it mention how this technology may or may not violate the privacy of innocent chatroom participants.

As researchers it is critical for us to consider the broader impacts of our work on society, especially when creating technologies that can further erode what little remaining privacy public citizens can still claim.