NSA may soon troll the social network sites

semantic web means they can easily build your profile

[linear]

[newscientisttech.com...]

It's hard to imagine anyone being surprised about it--if they can tease some value out of phone traffic analysis, how much more would be in the data you voluntarily provide to social network sites?

Quick precis: There's a paper out [www2006.org] on data mining social networks. It seems it was partly funded with NSA money via ARDA. It might be a gross oversimplification if not a misrepresentation to say the NSA is mining Myspace, but it makes a catchy headline. Those of you who study social networks may derive some value from the research paper directly.

[Moosetick]

If anything it may be of future value. If someone is 20 and has a page with lots of photos and links to freinds and in 15 years they go crazy and become an underground terrorist the info could come in handy.

[rogerd]

Interesting link, linear. It's hard to imagine that much useful data would come out of a bazillion MySpace pages, but perhaps in building a profile of an individual of interest it might help.