(perhaps of interest to AOIR-ers...) New Scientist Magazine has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals. < snip > http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg 19025556.200