HUMINT

According to my spy nov­els, the title of this post is short for “human intel­li­gence.” Fitting, because I learned today that the Central Intelligence Agency has a Facebook page, the National Clandestine Service.

Now, an arti­cle on Ars Technica dis­cusses the ways a social net­work­ing site like Facebook could be used by spy agen­cies to study social inter­ac­tions and pat­terns, per­haps in the fight against global terrorism.

However, the arti­cle also reports on the con­spir­acy the­o­ries sur­round­ing Facebook’s CIA con­nec­tion. Some appar­ently believe that Facebook is a government-run project to col­lect per­sonal data on American cit­i­zens and to track our friends and relationships.

Is Facebook a front for a gov­ern­ment spy pro­gram? Probably not, but those spooks are pretty sneaky. Still, would it stop peo­ple from going to the sites if they were owned by the gov­ern­ment? Or would another site just pop up to replace Facebook with the guar­an­tee that it was “non-spy”?

Maybe the les­son to take from this is that if you pro­vide peo­ple with a forum where it is easy to share their per­sonal infor­ma­tion, they will do it. And once they’ve got­ten a taste of shar­ing like that, they are likely to keep doing it even after the par­tic­u­lar site folds.

Related: Wikispy

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4. Bozeman police offi­cer resigns over com­ments he made on Facebook