October 27, 2009

The web Has Your Records

All netizens have a digital dossier. Your dossier is the accumulation of all the digital tracks you make when you use social media tools or browse online.

You may or may not be aware of the above fact but there are some alarming news like the CIA and the European Union are building a social networking surveillance system.

Tom Burghardt at Dissident Voice writes:

Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a “total information” surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call “actionable intelligence.”

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT’s “Work package 4″ is designed “to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.” Ponder that phrase again: “automatic dossiers.”

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”

The above is information scary but you can confuse the data miners if not avert them if you put your real life information in your social networking activities at minimum. And if you are a blogger writing on sensitive issues, you might want to do it anonymously.

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