Pat Dollard

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Fox News:

A privacy watchdog’s freedom of information request has revealed a government memo encouraging agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share — and to spy on them. Thanks to the request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS).

As of Thursday morning, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Digg had not commented on the report, which details the official government program to spy via social networking.

“Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuel a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages, and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know,” stated one of the documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities,” it said.

According to the EFF, this memo — which specifically details how the government evaluates potential citizen requests — suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full investigation. Other websites the EFF has revealed the government is spying on include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia.

With this revelation, the government joins a growing list of groups using social-networking sites to exploit and prey on people. Scammers and spammers are rampant, and hackers are increasingly turning to networks such as Facebook to spread viruses and Trojan Horses.

Still, the EFF worries that the Department of Homeland Security may be taking things too far. “While it is laudable to see DHS discussing the Fair Information Practice Principles as part of the design for such a project, the breadth of sites targeted is concerning,” the watchdog group wrote on its website.

The EFF uncovered efforts by the DHS to monitor social media during the inauguration of President Obama in much the same way. According to these documents, the DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to the political event.

Among the networks specifically cited for analysis “were general social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr as well as sites that focus specifically on certain demographic groups such as MiGente and BlackPlanet, news sites such as NPR, and political commentary sites DailyKos,” the EFF wrote.

For more information, read the full report at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.