NSA --> ARDA --> DTO --> W3C --> RDF --> ME.

Several weeks ago a blogger friend of mine posted a link to this article from the magazine New Scientist about the National Security Agency's interest in social networking software. It's an interesting read, no less because it gives an overview of what is called the semantic web, a schema to standardize web data formats across the Internet to improve compatability. The article is full of the typical alphabet soup of acronymns for governmental organizations, corporations and technological concepts. The gist is that efforts promoted by organizations like W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium to develop a Resource Description Framework that would allow databases and other web programs to communicate with one another could also make it easier for the federal government to "connect the dots" about any given individual, creating a profile that might include banking records, property records, entertainment preferences, sexual orientation and potentially embarrassing pictures from some long ago party best forgotten. Or to determine just how many degrees of separation there exist between, say, me and a terrorist organization. "No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA," the article explains. But the NSA is actively seeking ways to "make sense of the massive amounts of data" it collects, and a semantic web might prove useful in that effort. All of which led my friend to consider making her blog less public (though not to stop blogging altogether). It also echoes the point already made in class and reiterated by Jon Callas, chief security officer at a Silicon Valley-based encryption software company, who is quoted in the article thusly: "You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé." So, hi Mom!