My real name is......on the other hand:
Quote:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...25556.200.html
Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
* 09 June 2006
"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.
New Scientist has discovered that 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......
.....Meanwhile, 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.
<b>"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé.</b> People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.....
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Quote:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0606/061606nj1.htm
June 16, 2006
Two controversial counter-terror programs share parallels
..... Inherit the Winds
As National Journal <a href="http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0306/031706nj1.htm">revealed in February</a>, the NSA's Advanced Research and Development Activity took over TIA and carried on the experimental network in late 2003. ARDA continued vetting new tools and even kept the aggressive experiment schedule, still named after different winds, documents show.
But <b>it discontinued some programs, most notably a multimillion-dollar effort to build privacy-protection technologies. ARDA also abandoned the effort to build audit trails in TIA, which would have permanently recorded any abuse by users. ........</b>
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I'm not posting to rain on anyone's parade....but the second article is especially chilling. The potential for abuse, harrassment, persecution, prosecution, intimidation, all amount to control over what you say and do, now that the "gloves" are apparently coming off.
My advice is to remove references to your "real" name, anywhere that you have publicly posted them on the internet, and to watch what you write in emails, or say on the telephone, or say to anyone that you don't really know or trust.
They are spending billions of dollars on all of this information gathering and analysis. The fact that some of what they are doing is blatantly illegal, and that they have already put people in jail and held them without trial or access to a lawyer, or given them a hearing of the charges against them before an impartial judge, should convince you that they are serious and you need to be, too.
Just three years ago, as the last article above details, the "program", TIA, run by convicted felon and former navy admiral, John Poindexter, was supposedly "shelved". It wasn't shelved....it has morphed into something even more ominous and intrusive....without privacy protections and abuse audit restrictions that would have protected all of us from intrusion and harrassment by government intelligence agencies.
At the least, ordinarily I would apologize for bringing this here....but this is not "ordinary" news, and these are not "ordinary" times. You need to know all of this, because the news reports indicate that the government is not protecting us from the potential of abuse of our constitutionally guaranteed rights, so all that is left is for us to protect each other.