The Pentagon and Social Network

OK. This is weird. On the one hand the RIAA/MPAA want alll the social networks shut down because people MIGHT use them to share stuff. And they are bankrolling lobbyists all over the world to make this stuff happen.

On the other hand, New Scientist has an article entitled Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites because it has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency (the spooks),who are masters in listening to everyone in the world’s phone conversations and code-breaking, is bankrolling research into the bulk harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. Think of it as spook spam collection.

And in a rather ironic twist it seems that the “semantic web” championed by web standards organisations and writing accessible websites makes it dead easier for them to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records. This lets them make up profiles on people because lets face it half the profiles on myspace are lies or put there by the record companies (who want them shut down)

And I thought the nineties were weird.

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