NSA and our digital publics

apophenia: NSA spying on digital publics
A very good analysis from Danah Boyd, social networking/online communities academic and Yahoo thinker, on why the NSA snooping around our "digital publics", ie Myspaces and the like, matters. It should be no surprise to ANYONE that this happens. If you are surprised, get WITH IT! the point is, she says:

Just because things can be made persistent or information about people's social lives can be revealed does not mean that it should be done. What the government is doing is not simply watching people in public - they are taking this data and computationally analyzing it to get to the core of people's practices. This is an invasion of privacy and an act of intense surveillance where the government is spying on its own people. They are doing so without a warrant and justifying it by saying that it is public. Just because people act in public does not mean that it should be stored, analyzed and graphed.

She cites an amusing example of when photos say the "wrong thing" when taken out of their context.