That was the original headline I proposed for the Salon article I mentioned yesterday: turns out it’s far more prescient than I thought.

There’s big news today from NewScientist.com: the NSA is interested in social networking sites. And no, not because they want to put up a profile:

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.

Pardon my French, but that’s some scary shit.