Valerie Plame Added You As A Friend On Spookbook
Think of something useless and trendy -- something that wastes your time while adding absolutely nothing to your life or work while simultaneously exposing your identity and private information and whatever you're doing at the moment to a world of sinister strangers who only want to steal your ID and rape you. Right, we are talking about Facebook, which is a sort of web-based rolodex that anybody can look at, on the Internet. IT'S A WEB 2.7 SENSATION OMFG IT'S ON THE COVER OF NEWSWEEK!!1!
Now, think about the most inappropriate possible industry to combine with a Facebook-style application. If you guessed "U.S. intelligence services" then go ahead and appoint yourself "spy czar" or whatever because you are right. And we are fucked.
Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America's intelligence agencies prepare to launch "A-Space", an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.
The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Yes, if only our nation's intelligence operatives had been fucking around on Facebook adding "friends" and seeing who went to what party last weekend, the 9/11 hijackers would've been laughing so hard that they would've never bothered to board the planes. And just because there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq doesn't mean Our American Spies couldn't have just pretended, on Facebook, that such things existed ... which is pretty much what happened anyway.
US launches 'MySpace for spies' [Financial Times]