Pentagon's NSA sets sights on social-network websites

LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Pentagon's NSA sets sights on social-network websites
Feds funding research into mass harvesting
of information people post about themselves

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50593

If the prospect of being asked to explain some embarrassing detail about their personal lives by a prospective employer or a future romantic interest isn't enough to deter users of social-networking websites like MySpace.com from posting it online, perhaps this will – the National Security Agency is funding research into mass harvesting what people post about themselves on the Internet.

NSA, the Pentagon's high-tech agency that conducts eavesdropping and code-breaking, came under fire last month when it was disclosed it had amassed "the largest database ever assembled in the world," according to an anonymous source cited by USA Today, of the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans for the purpose of analyzing calling patterns to detect terrorist activity.

The information, reportedly provided upon request by several telephone companies, did not include customers' names, street addresses or other personal information – only telephone numbers. Calling patterns allow analysts to identify clusters of highly connected people and those who are intermediaries between those clusters and to determine how many links or "degrees of separation" a particular phone number has from an identified group of numbers.

But the NSA's phone-record database does not provide detailed personal data – and certainly not the kind of personal information millions of Internet users voluntarily post on social-networking sites.

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves" said Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. "You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realize you get Googled just to get a job interview these days."

MySpace.com, fast-growing online community, was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp last July. The site's popularity – over 80 million users – has been overshadowed by reports of sexual predators using the personal posts of teens to target their victims as well as employees being fired for their too-frank posts about their employers. In one case, a closeted homosexual who outed himself on MySpace was expelled from a Christian college because his secret lifestyle violated the institution's rules.

Now, according to a report by New Scientist, NSA is funding research that could lead to massive data-mining of Internet newsgroups and sites like MySpace.

While no plan to mine data has been announced by NSA, a research paper presented last month at a W3C – World Wide Web Consortium – conference in Scotland, entitled "Semantic Analytics on Social Networks," was partially funded by Advanced Research Development Activity, a research arm of NSA tasked with solving "some of the most critical problems facing the U.S. intelligence community."

ARDA, since renamed the Disruptive Technology Office, attempts to make sense of the massive volume of data NSA collects – an amount that grows by gigabytes each month.

The ARDA-funded research examined an emerging information technology called the "semantic web" and its usefulness at identifying connections between people.

The semantic web is an attempt by W3C to create a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework that will one day tag all data online with a unique, predefined, unambiguous identifier.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," said David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains."

It also means all those personal details, inappropriate jokes, political rants and lists of friends posted online could be scanned, analyzed, categorized and clustered with ease. And, if the semantic web reaches the potential its champions hope for, it can be combined with banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA – or some other user – to build extensive, all-encompassing personal profiles of individuals.

The ARDA-funded researchers successfully used the technology to identify hidden connections between scientists who were doing peer reviews of others' work.

"It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," said Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."

While privacy advocates warn that "automated intelligence profiling" of social-networking sites could ruin people's reputations or wrongfully expose them to prosecution since the posted information may not be true or complete, Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's said the technology cannot be stopped.

"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 said.

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