>Has Facebook ever been caught in the of letting intelligence agencies snoop? No.
Reacting to the Snowden leaks about PRISM, the United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7, 2013 confirmed in a statement that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using Facebook to collect information.
I honestly don't get it. This isn't 'Hacker News', at least, this 'Hacker News' forum is no longer occupied by 'Hackers'.
Incidentally, this reminds me -- later Summer this year, I had the chance to meet a lot Linux kernel developers. At some point a handful were speaking casually about Facebook -- and guess what, each and every one of them were 20 times more paranoid about Facebook and its intent than I am (and I'm pretty skeptical of everything FB does). I'm honestly very confused. I don't want to make the jump and say "astroturfing" -- but I don't know, maybe we have some Facebook developers here who probably work on some engineering tasks and never are exposed to the questionable side of things and genuinely think FB is up to only good. In real world, every true hacker that I personally know greatly distrusts Facebook and all that Facebook touches.
edit: ok, I think I may have said that a little too soon. Posts doubting Poitras are now more toward the bottom than the top, and my two posts are no longer negatively scored.
No. I wish we were just paranoid. This stuff really happens.
""Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting behavior of millions of people. Furthermore the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends." - Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler
You don't have to be paranoid about Facebook's intent to realize that it's a huge storehouse of personal data. Nobody with a brain thinks that Facebook strategizes every morning about how to collect the most data for intelligence agencies. However, a side effect of their business model makes it an unprecedented treasure trove of data about hundreds of millions of people and their relationships/interactions with each other.
"Nobody with a brain thinks that Facebook strategizes every morning about how to collect the most data for intelligence agencies."
I disagree, and I don't think I've forgotten my brain somewhere. Why I disagree? Because facebook, for all intents and purposes, is an intelligence agency. Doesn't mean that they welcome other agencies having a look at their data, but it certainly is more than a side effect.
Well, wouldn't you? Even if you never subpoena a single data point, there's a vast trove of information out there for the taking just from what people choose to put on FB.
The real value for intelligence is as a social science project. For example you became aware (through other channels) that unrelated individuals X, Y, and Z have taken up terrorism; if they were on Facebook then it's worthwhile to search through their profile history over the previous few years to see if there's some common behavioral pattern that's strongly correlated with people who actually take up arms instead of just posting support for their political cause of choice.
Reacting to the Snowden leaks about PRISM, the United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7, 2013 confirmed in a statement that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using Facebook to collect information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2...
Who are all these astroturf accounts commenting in here right now?