If they have implemented a way of looking up or monitoring things by themselves (and they obviously have and need to) and just give that information when the government comes knocking.. that's less bad.
This should not be surprising either, considering laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the long history of illegal wiretapping and illegal surveillance in general conducted by American intelligence agencies, with impunity.
Any skepticism about Facebook's availability to the NSA and CIA is, frankly, completely naive and ignores history among other things.
Do you mind showing some examples of these signs?
I'm not particularly skeptical, but it's the first I've heard of automated interfaces like these.
http://www.schneier.com/essay-306.html
And the rest of the article lists all kinds of other examples that exist worldwide.
If law enforcement have their own backdoor, that seems to suggest less judicial oversight. I personally trust Schneier to depict the state of affairs accurately, probably using public and non-public information.
Consider the warrantless wiretapping program that went on for 5+ years. We know that tools for court ordered intercepts were in place through CALEA and others. We also know that the telcos were told and accepted that FISA warrants were not needed for this monitoring. Similarly, we know that facebook obviously has tools in place for responding to warrants, and that it is probably true that facebook can legally reveal much/all of your account if they want to without a warrant. Facebook is quite likely to view building a friendly relationship with the IC to be beneficial.
Another way to think about it: Intelligence agencies strongly discourage the use of social networking applications both by their own employees and other federal agents.
I find it completely credible that any number of friendly and hostile intelligence agencies and security services have widespread access to facebook data and other social networking sites through a variety of means. It's unlikely to be as ham handed as the https://dni.facebook.com/ you might imagine, but it's most assuredly there. It's simply too attractive to not be.
Facebook doesn't yet require security clearance for employment.
Welcome to citations in the Google age. I remembered the original story but never saw his followup. I wish he had amended the first blog post.
Have you ever used a web framework like Django? Imagine its admin interface except with way more data.