America, land of the free, Home of the suspects...

[CichlidFan]

Feds may be checking out your Facebook profile

By Helen A.S. Popkin

You know your one crazy friend who's been refusing to hop on the social networking bandwagon since Friendster days -- not just because he doesn't want marketers profiling him, but because he doesn't want the government all up in his business, either?
Yeah, turns out he's not crazy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently received some disturbing documents as a result of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on government surveillance of social networks. According to its latest post about the ongoing lawsuit, the online privacy advocacy points out two pretty big elephants in the room.
Check it out:

People applying for U.S. citizenship: TheU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service "is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to 'friend' citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud, including evidence that their relationships might not live up to the USCIS' standard of a legitimate marriage."

• Reasonable: "Of course, there are good reasons for government agencies and law enforcement officials to use all the tools at their disposal, including social networks, to ferret out fraud and other illegal conduct," the EFF acknowledges in its findings.
• Creepy: According to one memo, the citizenship verification initiative engages in "armchair psychology by assuming a large friend network indicates narcissistic tendencies.'" What's more, it assumes "a user's online profile always accurately reflects her offline life," and suggests "there's nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation."

People belonging to specific demographics: "Leading up to President Obama's January 2009 inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to log 'items of interest' -- not just on general networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr, but sites that 'focus specifically on certain demographic groups such as MiGente and BlackPlanet, news sites such as NPR, and political commentary sites DailyKos.' "

• Reasonable: The EFF lauds the SNMC's inclusion of the Fair Information Practices Principles in the project, and the minimization of "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII) in the project.
• Creepy: It's not clear whether the information collected was deleted following the inauguration. What's more, recent studies find that with the right software, people can be "re-identified" even without their "Personally Identifiable Information."

Note that the EFF's FOIA lawsuit is still ongoing, and as such, the advocacy group hopes "to learn more about such activities and help bring further transparency and accountability to the ways in which government agencies and law enforcement officials collect and analyze information about us online."
Stay tuned!

I believe this is just one of the many ways in which the feds/government agencies are checking up on all of us....They probably track Google trends and dozens of other popular search engines as well....

CF