Is the NSA trolling MySpace?

Posted by Matthew Wheeland at 10:18 AM on June 9, 2006.

When you apply for a job, it's a safe bet that your future boss is going to google you and see what bubbles up. Even two or three years ago, such a search probably wouldn't have turned up much personal info for most people. But with the explosion of blogging and social networks like MySpace, it seems like just about everyone has left some kind of footprint on the web, for better or worse.

But now, tilting that balance much further toward "worse," New Scientist reports that the NSA is funding research into the "mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks." The MySpace-mining project, it seems, is an extension of the NSA's illegal wiretapping program.

The NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

The project -- run by a group at the NSA formerly called the Advanced Research Development Agency, now called the Disruptive Technology Office, per New Scientist -- seems like a companion project to the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program. That was another massive data-mining program that intended to compile "financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records" with intelligence data to identify potential terrorists.

Where TIA (which has lost its funding and is technically shelved) was outrageous because of both the scope of its reach and the incredibly sensitive (and confidential) nature of the data to be examined, this ARDA / DTO project is more insidious because it's taking advantage of people's willingness to form online communities and share information with relative strangers.

Although there are some potentially positive uses for this project -- the researchers tested it by successfully identifying conflicts of interest among peer-reviewers for scientific work -- the potential for abuse seems huge. The simplest way to protect yourself is also the most logical: be careful what you post online.

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream. [...] Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy.

Matthew Wheeland is AlterNet's managing editor.