NSA Planning to Use MySpace Data?
I say why not? Its out there. People got upset a few months ago over the NSA collecting phone records. Now the NSA will be able to track people at a much deeper level, including their likes, dislikes, how they feel about political issues and more. How can they do this? Because stupid people publish so much personal information about themselves that it is now possible to harvest MySpace for interconnected criminal and domestic enemy activity.
From the NewScientist Here:
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.
“You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resume. People don’t realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days,” says Callas.
If anyone is genuinely interested in protecting their privacy, they should never use their own name online. Anything ever posted online gets cached into Google’s search cache, the Internet Archive, and most likely, onto massive NSA databases for future reference. If one of the defining features of God is omniscience, then Google is pretty close to being the equivalent of an online deity. If you put it online, Google knows it, and remembers it.
And the government can get it.
