David Horowitz, NSA Spymaster

David Horowitz
Total Information Awareness Overlord
Discover The Network

Dear Mr. Horowitz,

I'm a big admirer of the work you've done on your Discover the Network project. It couldn't have been easy linking people like Michael Bérubé, Karen Armstrong, and Jay Leno to Osama Bin Laden and the Blind Sheik.

Now it looks like all that hard work has finally paid off. I mean, what New Scientist is describing here, or at least in the last sentence of what I've quoted below, is Discover the Network, isn't it?

"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

[...]

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

Oh and BTW, I haven't heard back from you about my request to have my box turtle, Pokey, added to the list. I hope you'll consider it.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot