It’s presumed—but not confirmed—that the National Security Agency employs social networking techniques to sift through its massive trove of intercepted communications and other data. In 2006, USA Today revealed that three U.S. telecommunications firms had turned over calling records to the NSA as part of an effort to identify potential terrorists in the United States. The phone records were described by the newspaper as a huge repository of data that was being used to help track down terrorists, not based on content, but by analyzing patterns of calls. An unnamed official told USA Today that the phone records were in fact being used for social network analysis, but no details were provided on the specific program or tool being used to conduct the analysis. NSA has also sponsored academic research into social network analysis, including a research paper by team of scientists at the University of Georgia, who published a paper on “Semantic Analytics on Social Networks.”
Source(s): USA Today, New York Times, New Scientist