# Social chaff

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-02-16T07:12:49Z


I was talking to Peter yesterday about the risk of accidentally getting on weird lists or being profiled as a threat. Hanging out with, or communicating with the wrong people online or on the phone could land you on a list that might get you hassled at the airport or worse. They apparently used social network theory to find the person who would know where Saddam was. Similarly, I could see people using all sorts of social network theory to figure out who to wiretap or hassle. The thought was that if you hang out with enough people, you might be able to confuse such analysis or profiling. Name-dropping on my blog is a form of social chaff since connections to random nodes must be confusing to analysis. I can see the gapingvoid card, now: "I'm just talking to you because you're social chaff". (Chaff is the strips of foil that fighter-planes drop to confuse radar as countermeasures to tracking.)





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#### Categories

Privacy, Social Software