DONALD RUMSFELD WOULD LIKE TO BE ADDED AS ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS

As if the removal of Billy Bragg's music wasn't bad enough, it now turns out that MySpace (and other social networking sites) are being trawled by the CIA as part of the War On Bad, Evil Things.

You might think you're just adding a friend who also likes the Arctic Monkeys, but if their friend had a friend who had a friend who once posted a message on usenet suggesting that what George W needs is a right good seeing to, you could find yourself being added to some sort of list:

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Of course, the propensity for list-making at the Pentagon means probably everyone is on a watchlist by now - we were amused to hear Fox News suggest "was once a member of the [British] Social Democratic party" as sign of weakness of moral character the other day - but even so, it's another thing to think about before throwing yourself too heartily into telling MySpace everything you do and think and feel.

[If you want to take the risk, No Rock has a MySpace corner]

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