The New Scientist reports the details of how spooks are adapting to online personalities:

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.

But how will they filter the noise (fake social networking) and plants (digital wall-flowers)?

No surprise, really. Private investigators use information sources readily available to them…heck, profit and even non-profit orgs do investigations with data from sites like MySpace. Public investigators are just following suit. I wouldn’t expect anything different. However, even if you say the public investigators should not be allowed to behave like this or that, the bigger/new question is whether they will exploit the loophole of using private or foreign orgs as a proxy.