"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.
Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that
the NSA has been logging phone calls .