NSA Datamining Social Networking Sites

NSA Datamining Social Networking Sites: "By tim Richard Forno wrote on Dave Farber's IP List: 'New Scientist Magazine 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.' Slashdot picked up the story, so many of you have probably already seen it. However, both the New Scientist story and much of the followup laid a misleading trail in the focus on social networking sites. The point is that one of the side effects of Web 2.0, the internet as platform, is that we all leave tracks in cyberspace, whatever sites we use. The kind of work described in this story is going on not just at the NSA, but in"