At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the
social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind
of information that people, particularly children, can put on the
sites.
Social networking sites have enjoyed phenomenal recent success.
Industry leader MySpace has attracted 85 million members with new
members joining at a rate of 250,000 per day. Users, most often
young people, use their own pages to swap information about
themselves, their hobbies, their friends and their favourite music
and films.
That kind of information is the subject of a research paper by a
team from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The paper,
Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, proposes methods for
combining the data posted on social networking sites and other
computer databases to reveal information about individuals.
The New Scientist discovered that ARDA (Advanced Research
Development Agency), credited in a footnote with part-funding the
research paper, is a branch of the National Security Agency, the US
government body responsible for surveillance and code breaking.
The news follows recent revelations about secret surveillance of
US citizens by other US security agencies. The New York Times
recently revealed that the US government is tracking financial
transactions of some citizens and non-citizens, while it has also
emerged in recent weeks that the government has tracked phone call
activity of some citizens since the terrorist attacks of 11th
September 2001.
In 2003 US Congress stopped Pentagon projects being operated by
retired admiral John Poindexter which aimed to mine public and
private records for information on individuals suspected of
terrorist activity.
Congress ended the programmes because they were worried that the
projects might put innocent Americans under suspicion, according to
a February 2004 Associated Press report. That report identified
ARDA as the office which would carry out software development in
the gathering of information from disparate sources.
The New Scientist report said that a Congressional Research
Service report identified ARDA, since renamed the Disruptive
Technologies Office, as a body which funds research into issues of
use to the intelligence community.
Meanwhile social networking sites have hit the headlines for
other reasons. The US Congress is attempting to limit the ways in
which young people use the sites in order to protect young people
and children. The Energy and Commerce subcommittee has just
finished a series of hearings on pornography and plans to issue
legislation to protect children online. The plans will contain some
measures to force social network sites to protect its users, said
US press reports.
