CIA uses Facebook, NSA wants social networking data

The CIA has a Facebook page. It invites students to apply for the National Clandestine Service. It has 2,844 friends. Is this interesting? Not really; the Agency is a well-known college recruiter already, visiting campuses to find promising recruits and hosting a rigorous two-summer internship for students. But it does raise the question: 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?

Some conspiracy theorists say yes, but go even further: Facebook is itself a government-funded project. To accept this thesis, you have to believe that because one guy at one venture capital investor in Facebook sits on another, unrelated board on which Gilman Louie, former head of In-Q-Tel (formely In-Q-IT), also sat, the CIA is running (or at least funding) Facebook. It also helps if you believe that "the Bush regime is a megalomaniacal cabal of mass murderers who want to crush all internal dissent, and like all dictatorial regimes, the first place they will look is students."

Fortunately, the student slaughters have not yet started, but some better-attested information about the government's interest in social networking did come to light last year. In an academic paper (PDF), partially funded by the NSA's ARDA program (now called the Disruptive Technology Office), the authors showed how social networks gleaned from the Semantic Web could be used to identify conflicts of interest among academic peer reviewers.

The ARDA project that helped to fund the research was called "An Ontological Approach to Financial Analysis & Monitoring." The goal seems to have been to use this sort of social-networking technology to keep money from flowing into the hands of terror groups, mobsters, and other unsavory characters who need to launder their cash. The paper notes that this is made more difficult by a lack of social-networking data from which to work, but the authors suggest that publicly-available networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster could help to supply that information.

Because those sites do contain such a wealth of personal information, along with information about a person's friends, relatives, and acquaintances, it would certainly not be out of the question for the government to attempt to harvest the data for its own use (a move that would not necessarily require any cooperation from the site operators). If this sounds like a lot of work for a potentially tiny payoff, consider that the government has been running a massive domestic telecommunications spy program with enterprise-grade equipment installed around the country, all apparently designed to allow for eavesdropping (natch) but also for building models of social networks that might help to identify terrorist cells and their supporters.

Are Facebook et al. actually CIA/NSA-backed companies that the agencies are using to create massive databases on Americans without having to deal with that pesky congressional oversight? Without any evidence of this, it seems grossly unlikely. If it does turn out to be true that the government was behind the creation of such popular, simple-to-use programs that millions of people voluntarily return to again and again, the people bureaucrats behind them need to be moved immediately into upper-level management at the IRS and Social Security Administration.

Far more likely is that young entrepreneurs hit on a few good ideas, and the government now sees an opportunity. Whether that opportunity can be used to prevent any actual crimes remains to be seen.

Nate Anderson, ars technica January 25, 2007