What user data stored on FB servers could be useful to intelligence agencies of that level? People brag about crimes they committed, IP addresses are logged and people may "like" jihad but criminals targeted by the NSA are surely not at that level of stupidity.
Also, FB may not have much of a choice to comply with those agencies, or find themselves pissing off a lot of high level people by refusing to comply with government agencies. But outsourcing / tolerating a network of bots to vastly boost revenue is probably considered fraud, no?
> What user data stored on FB servers could be useful to intelligence agencies of that level? People brag about crimes they committed, IP addresses are logged and people may "like" jihad but criminals targeted by the NSA are surely not at that level of stupidity.
It's not what people brag about, it's the social graph itself that's useful. All the other things like photo-tagging are extra candy.
More info at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al... and http://nplusonemag.com/leave-your-cellphone-at-home . Sorry it's late out here, or I'd copy/paste the relevant quotes for you--look for the bits about data mining and machine learning, especially in the 2nd article, everything is a signal and they do have the computing power to process it all, apply Bayesian belief nets, algorithms can pull intelligence information about you from the local shape of your social graph that you don't even realize can be inferred from it (humans are not very good at reading complex info from big graphs much further than simple "friend-of-a-friend" relationships).
Also, FB may not have much of a choice to comply with those agencies, or find themselves pissing off a lot of high level people by refusing to comply with government agencies. But outsourcing / tolerating a network of bots to vastly boost revenue is probably considered fraud, no?