That might sound somewhat grandiose, but bear with me. The sub-plot I’m referring to is when a group of hackers that go by the name of “Anonymous” — and “who are” — decided to take on a US security consultant who had threatened to reveal their identities. Anonymous had attracted the attention of the FBI and others after leading attacks on companies that had capitulated to pressure to ban WikiLeaks from using their services.

What interests me here is the result of the Anonymous raid. They recovered thousands of emails — several gigabytes’ worth — from this consultant’s company and posted them online. While attention has focused on the battle with Anonymous there’s something else there, and it’s this: Social networks are as vulnerable as they are powerful.

In emails and presentations the consultant paints a picture of hoping to sell services to clients close to the powers that be that would connect anonymous data to build a picture of individuals, based on their online activities. If I post anonymously on twitter, for example, but have a Facebook account under my name, then it’s possible, the consultant claims, to be able to connect the two and start learning more about me than I intended for you to know.

Now whether this is possible or not is contested, both by his own programmers and by people who have looked at the emails themselves. But what is clear is that this is a product that would be in hot demand. To mine the chaos of the Internet and be able to connect the dots to build profiles of individuals who would rather you didn’t is a sort of holy grail of the intelligence world — indeed, of any world that wants to know about people who might be its citizens, its enemies, its customers, its tormentors, its employees.

Indeed, some of this stuff already exists. A tool called Rapportive will plug into your email and collect data about the people you’re communicating with, based on their public profiles on social networking sites. This would include a photo of them, their location, their present position, any Facebook or Twitter messages they’ve recently sent.

Great for me, because I can find out whether the Stacey I’m corresponding with is female or male, and avoid embarrassing gaffes. But also unnerving: collating all this data highlights just how easy it is to get a fix on the individual without much effort. Another service, Gist, goes further, by grabbing all references to those people in public fora.

This is small potatoes, of course. The target of the Anonymous breaking boasted in emails and presentations that he could put together profiles of individuals based on their spouses’ public profiles and other data, drilling down into the lives of people even if they tried hard to cover their tracks online.

I don’t doubt it.

So what does this all have to do with uprisings? Well, we’ve seen in recent weeks the power of social media in mobilizing people — some anonymous in their online dealings, some not. Most of the uprisings, as I write, have ended in the downfall of governments, so those active in such movements may be safe. But what about those uprisings which fail? And could those uprisings be thwarted by a government which had these profiling tools in its armory?

The fact is that however hard we may try to keep our online dealings private, or anonymous, the chances are that tools are being built, have been built, to strip that anonymity away. It’s not yet clear whether this consultant was incorrect in his claim that he could unmask those behind Anonymous. They, in the end, proved smarter than he.

But what of the rest of us? And what does it say about the future of online activism if the technology that protects our identity proves weaker than the technology that can reveal it? My worry about this subplot of an absorbing saga is that this may prove to be the plot that still concerns us long after the main story is forgotten.

© 2011 Loose Wire Pte Ltd
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. You can reach him via email at jeremy@loosewire.org.

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