US Intelligence Mining Your Social Network Data

bs0d3 writes "U.S. Intelligence has hired social scientists to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. They intend to use this info to track sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability. Privacy advocates are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it reminds them of Total Information Awareness, a 9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions. In a recent budget proposal, the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist cells and other groups by tracking their meetings, rehearsals and sharing of material and money transfers."

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[E.I.A]

You might consider InQtel http://www.iqt.org/ and Visible Technologies http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/, both which fit this article's description, and have had tons of CIA seed money put into them. We know the pentagon has a sock-puppet program, and whatever law prevent them from operating in the US can be bypassed through private contractors hence (perhaps) Fusion Centers. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fusion_center Both the FBI and DHS are quite busy here too. I frequently observe FBI, .mil, dhs.gov, DoD, and other government IPs visiting my website and subscribing to comments. Do a whois on my latest visitor: 153.31.113.26 ~~ And yeah, go right ahead and mod this as "troll" too. Bloody snobs!