not just for stalking [insert name of person you're obsessing over here] anymore
friendster is not just for looking up your high school buddies, stalking your ex-[affiliation], or simple booty hunting anymore...[The] National Security Agency ...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.
No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.
...[The paper] reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.
...What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. ...ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community"
...The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office
via new scientist
so i suppose they weren't disruptive before... ?
on a happier note, i didn't miss my lilies blooming after all. pictures can be seen by clicking on that nifty flash flickr thing on the right.
posted by thixotropic @ 12:41 PM
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