Discovering NSA Code Names Via LinkedIn

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 11, 2013 @05:36AM from the knew-linked-in-had-to-be-good-for-something dept.

Okian Warrior writes with this news as reported by TechDirt: "The Washington Post revealed some of the code names for various NSA surveillance programs, including NUCLEON, MARINA and MAINWAY. Chris Soghoian has pointed out that a quick LinkedIn search for profiles with codenames like MARINA and NUCLEON happens to turn up profiles like this one which appear to reveal more codenames: 'Skilled in the use of several Intelligence tools and resources: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA.' TRAFFICTHIEF, eh? WEBCANDID? Hmm... Apparently, NSA employees don't realize that information they post online can be revealed."

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Re: Irony as now google is your pal by Em+Adespoton · 2013-07-11 07:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Digging a little deeper, if you refactor the contents of those search results, you get a VERY complete picture of what's going on... for example, PINWALE is the code name for Mission Systems, developed for the Military by Northrop Grumman. Most of the people who developed the system appear to be on LinkedIn :)
That's just a taste; anyone good at graph theory and data mining could probably put together quite a dossier of people and projects based on the public info available through LinkedIn/Google.