CIA uses Facebook, NSA wants social networking data

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/01/8701.ars


Is a government that seems fixated on using automated surveillance to understand the social links between people hoping to tap social networking sites for data? Certain conspiracy theorists say yes, but go even further: Facebook is itself a government-funded project. DUN DUN DUN. In an academic paper partially funded by the Disruptive Technology Office, the authors demonstrated how information gleaned from social networks on the web social networks gleaned could be used to identify connections among peers. Publicly-available networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster could help to supply that information on connections between terror groups or mobsters. Because those sites such as facebook contain such a wealth of personal information it would certainly not be out of the question for the government to attempt to harvest the data for its own use. And could be in the used to identify systems of money laundering.

Not only do information agencies want the data that facebook and other social networking sites have, but during civil and criminal trials, lawyers are turning to facebook in order to quickly find a wealth of information regarding a person's whereabouts and activities.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/05/11/facebook-lawsuit-cp-511.html

This is an application on facebook called Nexus that makes a graph out of your friends. Each friend of yours is a node, and if they are friends each other they are connected by an edge.

This is interesting to see in context of our class because you can observe subgroups (social cliques in this context) in a real world example. Also you can find one or two local bridges from your groups of friends to one another.

For example, on my Nexus, i have three subgroups: friends from public high school, friends from catholic grade school, and friends here at northwestern. My local bridges are a girl that lives in my dorm that went to my high school, and a guy who was in both Holy Trinity k-8 and Herbert Hoover High School.

The ease at which information is accessible on Facebook, through apps like Nexus and GPS trackers, raises questions about its use for surveillance. A current debate relevant to this issue is that of privacy.
This article summarizes the debate pretty well (http://www.alternet.org/story/72556/). A good point it makes is that the concept privacy is evolving from being left alone completely to having control over who knows the information. Do you think the fear of surveillance can be avoided if Facebook gives its users the option to choose with whom to share certain news feeds?