should I go through the ethics process of getting approval and ethical review? How would this affect the validity and publishing potential of this data?

:oD Well, this reminds me of a post from Barry Wellman on socnet mailing list just yesterday, about research on 'terrorists' networks. I guess these kinds of studies might be a good track to start looking for journals not so aware of ethics... Now let me be clear: everything above is a j-o-k-e. Just to kindly suggest, like Sue just did, that your goals might have been more clearly exposed. -- Christophe Prieur / prieur@liafa.jussieu.fr Sense, Orange Labs / sociology of uses Liafa, University Paris-Diderot / graph algorithms