June 09, 2006
Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, reBlogged by ts
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.
