Wired’s Threat Level blog reports on an interesting data-mining report released by the Director of National Intelligence (now who wouldn’t want that title? Really now…) outlining several surveillance and intelligence gathering initiatives focusing on the online community. Not the least of this is dubbed ‘Reynard’. The stated aim of this project is to

“seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

Now, let’s think about this for a moment. “identify the emerging social, behavioral, and cultural norms”. So if I understand this correctly, these guys are meme-hunting in the hopes that that will lead them to identify supposed suspicious behavior. Is it any wonder that I gave up Anthropology? But, of course, they’re doing it covertly but in the public sphere, so that makes it legal. Leaving aside for a moment the absolutely terrifying implications of what ‘suspicious behavior’ could be construed as in the context of the web; I must say I love the image of rooms upon rooms of dour-faced men in poorly fitted suits doggedly combing the net for every LOLcat they can find.

What delicious surrealism.

Link to the full report. Via Threat level Via Secrecy News

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