Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

[Eugen Leitl]

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

    * 09 June 2006
    * NewScientist.com news service
    * Paul Marks

"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post
online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a
Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in
noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and
Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist 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.

Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has
been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The
Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone
companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the
White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping
legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's
action.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have
limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of
someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots".
Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people
with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups.
The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a
member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could
connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking
flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter
details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they
might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including
political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go
much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking
and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox
religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they
are gay.

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumi.
People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days,"
says Callas.

Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes
information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which
cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions
we make, such as buying a house.

Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in
incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these
incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called
the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website
will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by
computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of
Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be
able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform
calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a
heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical
description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like
separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of
inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.

The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have
unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to
perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays
will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags,
allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.

On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a
breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been
announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a
funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference
in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team
led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of
the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social
networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people.
The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According
to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the
Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money
on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US
intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the
massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around
4 million gigabytes a month.

The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet
information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have
more than 80 million members (see Graph).

The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be
easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject
close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific
peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can
people who have previously co-authored work together.

So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online
social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply
outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged
commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of
computer science papers.

Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and
authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made
relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up
softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."

The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national
security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider
trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank
records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted
groups, says Sheth.

The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The
DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's
controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That
programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was
suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA
were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September
2003 Defense Appropriations Act.

Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully
people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially
since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or
incomplete, De Roure warns.

But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is
unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences
from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I
don't see much that will stop it," he says.

Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves
they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but
being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the
delete button.
Related Articles

    * Software could add meaning to 'wiki' links
    * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9295
    * 07 June 2006
    * Interview: Six clicks of separation
    * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025481.700
    * 26 April 2006

Weblinks

    * Electronic Frontier Foundation campaign against wiretaps
    *
https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?alertId=212&pg=makeACall&JServSessionIdr
002=dbq7ztr162.app8a
    * Disruptive Technologies Office, Wikipedia
    * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_Technologies_Office
    * MySpace
    * http://www.myspace.com/



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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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