Facebook deepens ties with intelligence agencies. Is it selling data? | Hacker News Reader

Facebook deepens ties with intelligence agencies. Is it selling data?

social.venturebeat.com

32 pointsDJN15 comments

It's somewhat unfortunate that technology is moving a lot faster than the law can keep up with. Among some groups of people, Facebook is essentially the modern-day version of the phone network: how they do their routine communication. But the phone network has a bunch of legal protections, e.g. if the police want to listen in on some conversations they need a warrant, even if the phone company were willing to sell them a wiretap without a warrant (that's why the warrantless-wiretapping scandal was a scandal). But Facebook is currently just treated as a simple case of a company that has some information, which the government can purchase if it wishes.

"...helping legislators and intelligence agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work."

Hmmm...I wonder what "regular line of work" Facebook is helping the CIA with.

the most obvious would be large crowd behavior analysis. That would not necessarily require divulging individual information.

The other possibility would be some form of association tracking. This is not significantly different than trying to determine enemy dispositions by inspecting who communicates with whom, and at what frequency. IOW, traffic pattern analysis.

Stay away from social networks as much as possible. The world will be a better place if personal data stays personal.

I don't know why there isn't a groundswell in favor of a gnu facebook, democratically run, ssl enabled, with powerful opt out privileges... Maybe because I don't have time to start it...

Because open-source can only do some things. It took an Ubuntu to make Linux somewhat usable, and even then it is miles behind an OS X. Some endeavors can only be done when there is lots of money at stake, that's a reality of our world today.

I disagree -- it takes motivated, large scale cooperation of resources. Sometimes money can buy it, sometimes you don't need money to buy such.

PERHAPS you can argue given a boring problem (e.g. Linux usability for grandma) and getting people to work on it takes money. But that is contingent on the arrangement of society, it isn't a universal principle or anything.

As for Ubuntu -- um, as a newly converted FreeBSD user, I think there appeared a free usable system a long time ago...

there's no good open p2p stack that would be able to support it (eliminating the need for servers would be priority #1 for such project)

Seems to me that every node would have to be both server and client, since we need to connect a person's digital profile with their control of the server that handles their profile -- open source at a local machine. (Stallman said something like this in his article.)

Seems like everything hinges on caching and timestamping and digital signing (again, not my ideas). Such handwaving might help solve the scalability problem; how we solve privacy, I don't know -- seems like once a profile has been read, there is nothing to prevent that reader from caching and propagating it however they please. It could be unsigned, but I am sure a thief wouldn't wait to confirm that someone's account password was signed...

Anyway, this is cool, ... I hope someone works on it for me ;)

Heh. Many people believe that Facebook was founded by people from the CIA, which would make perfect sense for them to reach back.

See http://www.itsecurity.com/features/cia-facebook-conspiracy-0... for a reasonably balanced take on that theory.

That sounds a little too conspiratorial. However legally, it would somehow make sense.

NSA probably already copies all the data it wants by tapping straight into the backbone connections via AT&T and other providers. NSA is more hidden from public scrutiny and doesn't have to worry much about those pesky little laws. CIA on the other hand, is more visible, might not have access to all of that technology as NSA, and is scrutinized a little more by the public. So they might choose a "smarter" approach than just brute-force copying everything.

So legally I would guess that other parties (companies, other citizens) probably can spy on American citizens, and then sell the data back to the CIA. I am sure that is already going on as far as Choicepoint, for example, is concerned. So I would say, it would certainly make sense for them to somehow obtain data from Facebook.

I saw a guy buy a meat cleaver the other day. Is it possible he is a psycho killer?

But was he also buying formaldehyde, rope, a shovel and was google-ing stuff like "how to dispose of a body" recently.

Why the editorialized title? the "is it selling data?" addendum is just commentary as it's not related to the article....

Wait, Facebook might not be selling data? I find that surprising.

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