Page 30-31, New Scientist issue 2555, 10 June 2006. Keep out of MySpace: Social networking websites could be the latest target of the US National Security Agency
New Scientist has discovered that the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specializes 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 organization 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 intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links of "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organization. By adding the online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, 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 descibing drinking and drug-taking exploits... "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 [ PGP chief security officer ] Callas. Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records...) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house. Right now this is difficult to do, because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Definition Framework... "RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton, UK, who is an adviser to the W3C. "It means you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains."... [the NSA]'s interest in [harvesting the semantic web] is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May. That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team lead by Amrit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organization called ARDA. ... Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month. ... So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers. Joshi says their system found conflicts of interest between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier", Joshi says. "It picked up softer [ non-obvious ] conflicts we would not have seen before." The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security services and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers of blacklisted groups, says Sheth. ... [ ARDA renamed to Disruptive Technologies Office ... ] ... [ references to the Total Information Awareness project, which was shelved, but elements continue in the September 2003 Defence Appropriations Act ] ... Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead ot miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue, or incomplete, De Roure warns. But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks that the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says. Callas thinks people have to wise up about how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discrete is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button. -- Matthew J Toseland - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.
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