[BNM] Death to s/facebook/fedbook and the great CIA social datamining exercise

[Nick Taylor]

> Although they have a lot of factual information agencies are surprisingly
> thin on the ground when it comes to your viewpoints and political outlook
> (i.e. how you think and where your loyalties are regarding certain issues).
> They also need to research associations/friends. This is mostly done in real
> life by surveillance, questioning friends/integrating into your social group
> and email/phone tapping. Social apps can provide a lot of this information
> very easily without this work needing to be done. 



Yea - although "if they wanted to investigate you" there's a number of 
ways that they could do it without recourse to facebook...

... but facebook is basically a goldmine handed to them on a plate.

If they have anything to do with it at all. I think it's possibly more 
likely that it just so happened that one of their investments in 
data-mining coincidently turned into one of THE social networking apps.

I'm not sure that the CIA is quite as competant as is generally believed 
either. I read this thing recently where part of the reason Iraq was 
such a fuck-up is that there is that US intelligence doesn't actually 
have a lot of experience... the average CIA "expert" being mono-lingual 
and with less than 5 years experience.

Still... maybe that's what they want us to believe... although the 
results they get would seem to suggest otherwise.