Did you ever think that the US government would gather data from websites like MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal to learn more about you?  If not, an article New Scientist is currently running will undoubtedly surprise you.  From the article:

"New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specializes 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…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."

Pretty scary, ehh? What bothers me about this isn't really that the NSA is taking public information, putting it into a database, and trying to connect to dots.  What bothers me is that it doesn't make sense to datamine MySpace for terrorist… So why are they doing it?  It's not like the people who bombed the WTC had MySpace profiles… Who are they trying to monitor?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.