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NSA Looking Into MySpace
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-06-09
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Social networking sites allow their users to post all kinds of personal details about themselves, and data mining technologies backed by federal agencies will make sure the government can easily review those details too.
 | | Government to Review Personal Data on MySpace |  |
"Discretion is the better part of valor."
Caution is preferable to rash bravery. Said by Falstaff in King Henry the Fourth, Part One, by William Shakespeare. (source: Bartleby.com)
The race to develop and deploy standards of presenting information online could eventually replace the myriad incompatible formats used by competing social networking and other websites. That could play into the data mining plans of the federal government as described in a New Scientist report.
Attitudes toward discussing one's personal life, particularly among younger Internet users, have shifted to a much freer way of thinking. Many people post personal and even intimate details along with the mundane happenings in their lives.
Quite a few people who indiscreetly posted details that would have been best kept private have experienced real world repercussions, like losing jobs. Soon those details could become part of a much broader look at people's lives.
The report noted that the National Security Agency has been investing heavily into data mining technology. Couple that with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) under development by the World Wide Web Consortium, and creating detailed pictures of people's lives from their online behavior will be a reality.
New Scientist connected the dots between NSA data mining and RDF in its report:
On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology 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 led by Amit 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 organisation called ARDA.
ARDA used to go by the name Advance Research Development Activity, it is now called the Disruptive Technology Office. ARDA's role has been characterized as spending money on research to solve problems confronting the intelligence community.
The article said one of those problems involves interpreting the data the NSA collects, with some of those sources increasing by 4 million gigabytes per month. Sites like MySpace and other social networking efforts have millions of members, with many regularly posting more content each day.
Connecting pieces of online puzzles could lead to tracking down terrorists or other criminals. Many concerns about what the government may be collecting can be avoided by following Falstaff's advice on discretion and not posting as much personal information online.
The social networking sites won't like it much if people heed that advice in substantial numbers, though. Much of the appeal of social networking comes from the voyeuristic interest people have in others, and trimming away the juicy bits will make the whole much less appetizing.
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Tags: NSA, MySpace
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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