Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites (myspace, etc...)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19025556.200

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

1) Create a personal profile as a Conservative Republican

2) Network yourself to other Conservatice Republicans

3) Once networked, change your profile to a Islamic Jihadist bent on World Domination (Or a gay sadomasochist prostitute into anal fisting).

...that could get you 'renditioned' to on of those 21 countries the CIA sends people to - or sent to Gitmo or some other such thing. They wouldn't tell you why they abducted you in the middle of the night and you wouldn't be allowed to contact your family.

....is on myspace. They should have fun reading his political posts. If he starts having odd 'problems' -- we'll know why I guess.

On goes the dictatorship/fascist regime....

Most of what they are doing is a waste of time and money for mounds of useless information.

Even with their supercomputers, they don't have the manpower to analysis most of this data.

However, if they want to go after dissidents like us in the near future, they now have tons of info.

focusing on blogs is much easier than monitoring the whole www.

if google can maintain and analyze all their stats, it's not hard for the NSA to do the same.

it's not like this is the only tool in their tool box, though humint is more $$$ and the smart bombs aren't getting any cheaper they are watching and recording :evilgrin:

total information is certainly a boneheaded idea but focusing on specific domains is a totalitarian states wet-dream come true.

Listing Osama Bin Laden in your friends list.