EU project to track all your tweets

I stumbled across Wikileaks this week, a website that leaks all sensitive information into public domain such as the leak of the UK's Ministry of Defence document on how to stop leaks.

There's tons of fascinating stuff in there, and one of the more recent leaked documents is the European Commission's Working Package 4 (WP4) which aims to crawl all over your Facebook status updates and Twittering tweets to see if you're a terrorist or anarchist.

Here's the lowdown:

EU social network spy system brief, INDECT Work Package 4, October 4, 2009

This file, marked "confidential", describes development of an EU-funded intelligence gathering system ("INDECT work package 4") designed to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites to in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.

"The aim of work package 4 (WP4) is the development of key technologies that facilitate the building of an intelligence gathering system by combining and extending the current-state-of-the- art methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the goals of WP4 is to propose NLP and machine learning methods that learn relationships between people and organizations through websites and social networks ...

"Given an XML data corpus extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.); an annotation and knowledge representation scheme that should provide the following information:

• The different entity types according to the requirements of the project.
• The grouping of all references to an entity together.
• The relationships between different entities.
• The events in which entities participate."

The file can be viewed in all its glory here, and the INDECT home page provides more background.

There's nothing that surprising about this development. 

If anyone thought their Facebook and Twitters were private for example, then they are mad. 

As soon as you record anything electronically it's in public domain and all government authorities will track and analyse your thoughts, comments, status updates and more.

On the other hand, the good news is that the idea we came up with in Hong Kong for SWIFT to be the secure owner of a trust score for individuals and businesses, based upon social network comments and rankings, has been short-circuited. 

All SWIFT needs to do is work with the Asian, European and American governmental authorities and take their analysis of your tweets.

Simples!