I appreciated the author's concise visual clarity in connecting the dots to overview the persistent tactical progress of the NSA as a military entity with an innocuous civilian face, i.e. funding academic research. Journalistic integrity presented a good balance of factual information, sufficient to educate the average lay reader in the terms and goals of the scientific field being explored, with possible applications of the information gainst civil liberties, referenced against historical precedent since 9/11.

Paul Marks does a fine job in highlighting all the important issues in this matter of national security vs. personal privacy on the web, now that W3C is thinking to implement within a few years the RDF semantic web technology. This evolution in merging and making web data formats compatible is logical and predictable, the same way things happened in the hardware industry or the industry of virtual machine software. As for the social and ethical consequences of this new technology and its use by intelligence and defense agencies or commercial agents, the final advice for people to take responsibility for what they write about themselves on the web is wise, for the notion and reality of web privacy will surely change in the near future.

An excellent and non-technical report on how personal information supplied to social networking websites such as MySpace is attracting the interest of the NSA. The writer discovered that the NSA is partially funding research to correlate personal data on the web, and gave details on how this funding link was found. As far as I can verify, the reported funding link is accurate. The writer also gave a nice description on current efforts to standardize the information format on the web, and discussed how these efforts could be good for sharing information but bad for privacy. The title and some of the sentences in the report are a bit sensationalistic. An timely report on an important topic.

The New Scientist generally does an excellent job of explaining to non-scientists the implications of advances in medicine, technology, etc., on everyday lives. This piece is no exception, and the fact that the Pentagon and NSA has refused to comment on it is proof that the magazine has, again, covered important new territory.