Why the Widespread Use of FaceBook is a Serious Problem

FaceBook is a national security problem for every country, including the United States of America.

FaceBook is not social media, because FaceBook users do not actually communicate very much to each other using it. Instead, it is social networking. FaceBook users use FaceBook principally to show each other who are their friends, and by doing this, they show each other (and perhaps more importantly, they show themselves) what sort of person they really are.

The national security problem comes from the fact that the combined FaceBook pages of all the people who work for the government, the military, and all their friends, provide a quite comprehensive picture of the social network of those people. And for anyone who has access to the statistics about real-time use of the system, the amount of "useful" information is mutiplied a hundredfold or more.

I wrote "useful" because the only uses to which such information can be put are in fact misuses or abuses. The national security problem stems from the fact that the FaceBook servers have access to a dynamic view of the social network of the civil service and the armed forces of any country in which FaceBook is widely used. So any agency which has access to the FaceBook servers and the client datastreams can use that data to identify potential targets of surveillance, harrassment, bribery, blackmail, torture or assassination.

For example, an agent A could know who a particular functionary F of a particular government ministry is going to have drinks with this evening, and where and when. Now what if they also know that the functionary is very, very interested in some other person M, but has never had direct contact with her. Now imagine that the agent A has access to a good friend G of that other person M. They instruct the friend G to take the other person M to that place that evening, and thereby introduce the agent A and the third party G to the functionary. Perhaps without the other person M even knowing she was involved, and very probably without raising any suspicions on the part of the functionary F who may well feel it was he who made the contact between the two groups, motivated by his interest in M. The functionary F would not then have the slightest suspicion that his meeting with A had been arranged in any way. The agent A could then proceed to cultivate a relationship with the functionary F and win some confidence, perhaps with a view to later bribery or blackmail.

It's easy to make up more elaborate stories. Perhaps we need someone to write some into a really good tele-novela, or a bestselling thriller, to get people to pay attention to the problem. It is serious.

Now you don't actually need access to the FaceBook servers to do this sort of thing. All you need is a critical mass of "silent FaceBook friends" of employees of the civil service and armed forces and their friends, and the FaceBook rules will allow this network of silent friends compile a database almost as good as the one the FaceBook servers have.

The solution is to develop the transparent, secure communications system I mentioned in the earlier post today.