Big Brother is Watching Your MySpace
Friday, June 9th, 2006
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.
Yeah! That’s a pretty stupid way of collecting information for profiles… Have they actually looked at a myspace page before? Myspace is the antichrist of W3C, …lol. Does the NSA even have a clue what they are talking about?
…I mean, take mine for instance; http://myspace.com/foodnotoil
It’d look like I’m some sort of eco-terrorist wanting to bring down the entire global trade system. I mean, …whoops.
…No, in reality, I’m just a frustrated individual that no one will listen to. This just puts one more layer between my intended reason for living & those that I want to imbue upon my understanding & reasoning for being an “eco-terrorist.” Lables & profiles only disntance two realities with a fiction.
Not that they care to stop anything anyways, …I’ve used email spoofers through proxy servers to send email as a “terrorist” to various powerful people in the white house & it brings forth no response… The NSA are idiots that’ve lost touch with reality.
We’re living on a planet that could very well be destroyed by climate change, and you mean to tell me harvesting myspace profiles are their top priority? I mean, …COME ON!
Brief Description of Climate Change:
..There exist many different natural storehouses of greenhouse gases all over the planet; from the fossil fuels we dig up, to the plants & trees that absorb CO2, to the oceans and permafrosts that retain methane & other elements.
Humans, in particular, have hijacked some of those natural greenhouse gases and contuously vapourised them into the atmosphere. As we have been doing this, global average temperatures have been rising faster, lock step in line with our global CO2 emissions.
As temperatures rise, we risk setting off “tipping points” of other natural greenhouse gases or catastrophy-fueled events. These tipping points include, but are not limited to:
* ice sheets melting resulting in less white ice bouncing sunlight back into space, fueling more warming as more blue waters soak up more sunlight & heat.
* Warmer waters fuel hurricanes to grow bigger.
* melted ice means higher sea level(s), flooding, killing & displacing people in areas home to thousands/millions of people.
* oceans also absorb CO2, and that’s starting to cause the oceans to acidify. Too much acidification destroys phytoplankton. When you destroy phytoplankton, pretty much the entire foodchain of the oceans risk a terrifying collapse since phytoplankton is the bedrock of the ocean food chain.
* hotter & hotter temperatures will eventually lead to the amazon catching fire in the not too distant future, releasing vast amounts of more greenhouse gases.
* amazon rainforest is a big part of air conditioning of the world. That much less plants & trees soaking up CO2 will mean much more CO2 stays in the atmosphere for even longer, driving temperatures further still.
* Drive the temperatures far enough, and ~10,000,000,000,000 tons of methane hydrates, a greenhouse gas 21 times stronger than CO2, start to melt more rapidly from the bottom of the oceans & within permafrosts, causing the oceans to boil in a firy display some might refer to as “armageddon…”
Further, this saught-after semantic web is far from implemented and would take MASSIVE amounts of time to convert everything over… Just because the W3C puts out a press release saying they finally came out with the new version, doesn’t mean the web is now running this way… It requires a trickle down effect and a long drawn out period where web designers slowly pick up the new way of coding.
In fact, the NSA’s openness of wanting to harvest information is likely to get companies to hesitate to implement for fear of backlash and profit prevenue drops… Remember, Google faced this situation earlier and there was lots of hustle & bustle. I don’t think many corporations are going to go blindly off this NSA cliff as easily as the NSA might wish them to.
http://worstofmyspace.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11recruit.html?hp&ex=1149998400&en=781ea88cb29e91cb&ei=5094&partner=homepage Apparently you shouldnt mention the word “blunts” on your myspace if applying for a job…
Finally I understand why it’s been so hard to get a job lately…