It’s a tin hat’s nightmare come true. Or possibly true in the not-too-distant future.
New Scientist magazine reports that the Pentagon’s super snoopers are funding research on data mining social networking sites like the infamous MySpace.
The magazine writes: “The 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.”
Cue The Imperial March.
