Fri

Jun 9
2006

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

NSA Datamining Social Networking Sites

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 commercial operations doing data mining and profiling for everything from direct sales to political fundraising. And while a lot of this work is going on behind closed doors, some of it is open to the public. Look at fundrace and zillow (and trace an individual from one to the other), and you'll see how the tools of surveillance and privacy invasion are becoming "democratized" (so to speak.)

And this isn't all bad -- the paper that triggered the story was not about datamining MySpace and similar networks at all. It was about looking for conflicts of interest among reviewers of scientific papers, which would be a useful tool indeed, and one very relevant to the story I posted the other day about Nature's experiments with open peer review. (What led New Scientist to the NSA connection was a footnote that identified an NSA group called ARDA as one of the funders of the research.)

Another interesting tidbit to me was the fact that the DOD has renamed that NSA group "The Disruptive Technology Office." I'm sure that they are looking at a lot more than data mining ... as should all of you.

P.S. Slashdot clearly got the story from IP, since it paraphrases Richard rather than the New Scientist story itself, but doesn't credit him as the source. I'd love to see more bloggers using (and acknowledging) mailing lists as their source, because there are a lot of very interesting conversations that happen in other places than blogs...


tags: web 2.0  | comments: 7   | Sphere It
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Comments: 7

  npdoty [06.09.06 01:59 PM]

It was popular about a year ago to talk about TheFacebook.com's huge social network of college students and the connection it might have to the CIA or DARPA. The connection was pretty tenuous (a chain of board members and their organizations) so maybe it really just was an unfounded conspiracy theory. But the concept always made sense to me: not so much that the CIA was data-mining the facebook right now to catch terrorists, but that the government would want to support research on the huge graphs that are social networking sites.

An example of the articles about Facebook's funding: A Connection Between 'The FaceBook' and CIA?

  adamsj [06.10.06 09:33 AM]

I'd love to see more bloggers using (and acknowledging) mailing lists as their source, because there are a lot of very interesting conversations that happen in other places than blogs...

There a simple way to encourage that, as well as to encourage back-linking generally: If someone picks up a story and doesn't give credit where it's due, return the favor by putting nofollow into your link to the the offending posting.

  Raman [02.11.07 10:45 AM]

Here is another example of web 2.0 based social networking. http://www.amicoz.com

  化工 [04.13.07 05:57 AM]

There a simple way to encourage that, as well as to encourage back-linking generally: If someone picks up a story and doesn't give credit where it's due, return the favor by putting nofollow into your link to the the offending posting.

  gg [04.13.07 05:59 AM]

http://www.tthg.cn There a simple way to encourage that, as well as to encourage back-linking generally

  Raman [04.24.07 07:11 PM]

A generic social networking site cant make any good progress unless it has something special. Making friends online has becoming a boring topic now-a-day. Lets think about molecular social concept.

  Harrison Nash [06.22.07 01:53 AM]

An opera house strikes a deal to show its productions in cinemas in order to reach "a broader audience"...

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