For those interested in the advance of monitoring techniques the following will be old news, the fact that this is going into operational mode is however a bit disturbing.
Dark Web is a project of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Arizona together with the National Science Foundation.
Dark Web is matching websites, chats and emails with identifiers leading to the actual authors with a 95% hit rate even when the authors are hiding themselves with very sophisticated approaches.
This Dark Web is structured to monitor and identify terrorist use of the Internet and similar applications but is generally not restricted to such authors of messages. The approach is not new, however the combination of identifiers in the typing with a trace routing on the highest level gets astounding results.
An information link can be found at:
http://ai.arizona.edu/research/terror/publications/ITCS_Dark_Web_submission.pdf
http://icadl.org/research/terror/index.htm
http://www.semantic-web.at/1.57.resource.1417.scientists-use-the-x22-dark-web-x22-to-snag-extremists-and-terrorists-online.htm
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,505255,00.html
http://www.shortnews.de/start.cfm?id=682427
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070913112659.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6664425
