Sunday, June 11, 2006

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

A NewScientist post titled 'Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites' looks at how sites such as MySpace and Friendster could be the latest target of the US National Security Agency as it gathers personal data for counter-terrorism:

"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."

No sites are free from information collection: mobile identities for immobility of the individual?

No comments: