The Hot Girl That Just Added You On Facebook Is a Terrorist

A few months ago, I was using that sleazy Badoo site, trying my damnedest to find a girl that I might meet in real life. If you recall the feature, I was unsuccessful. After the site spammed my mom — asking her for her birthdate — I ended up talking to a high school senior from East Queens that was posing as a hot girl from Park Slope that worked for the site, fielding for harmful content and fakes (I know, right?). After publishing the piece and receiving a startling phone call from Badoo’s PR director — who explained the girl had to be a fake — it was time to confront the girl.

After she asked, “Are you going to kill me?” the girl came clean, and explained that for a final project at school she was doing a research paper on internet gurus. She mused, “You can get people to do anything on the internet. You can do anything you want.” And while her youthful concept of digital invincibility probably has yet to develop into the category of paranoia that I share with my colleagues over many privacy issues, her attitude isn’t unpopular. This attitude, according to an official Australian Government report that Business Insider just got its hands on, is in fact, good enough for terrorists.

I downloaded the PDF (which you can also have by clicking here) and was totally blown away by how fun it is to look at. With colorful info-graphics, bar charts and large pull-quotes from Sean Parker, this is one of the better published materials I’ve seen by bureaucrats. After teaching the gray-hairs and greenhorns about Facebook and outlining legalities (thru page 75), the report gets really captivating when it illustrates a case study performed by none other than the United States Department of Defense. This study entitled: The Robin Sage Experiment explains how Thomas Ryan, a third-party contracted by the U.S., got under the skin of soldiers and threatened security. The report shares thusly:

‘Ryan's decision to make Sage a young, attractive female brought an interesting response from some of the male connections, who offered jobs and tickets to conferences and complimented Sage about her pictures. Ryan states that the 'worst compromises of operational security I had were troops discussing their locations and what time helicopters were taking off.’

After the section on Robin Sage, some proverbs of safe social-networking are cited from a manual by the Operations Security Professional's Association, “Assume the enemy is reading what you're writing.” And the most poetic morsel of military debrief-writing I’ve come across yet: “Information is a jigsaw puzzle and … any piece, no matter how small, can endanger lives.” Now, I know that this is serious, and I shouldn’t be enjoying this text so light-heartedly, but can you blame me? As a guy that could tell you he’s had plenty of experience with bots, porn-profiles, spam ‘come-see-my-pics’ emails — having been accosted by hundreds in my internet career — I feel I know what to look for. I feel I know how to protect myself. But, perhaps I’m just as naive, since I was punked by a high-schooler on Badoo. In that case, I was truly had. However, I still knowingly talk to fakes sometimes, when I’m bored, and my thinking is, “Ok, let’s just pretend you are real for five minutes; I have nothing better to do.”

A grasp of social media is a must in today’s military. As a United States soldier, you must fork over your online profiles and community pages per brigade, platoon, etc. You must take full responsibility for any damages that could occur were you to drunkenly post images of yourself defecating on a POW, tweeting your unit’s location. The United States also teaches its men and women in uniform how to use social media, with a dos don’ts lists for Facebook and Twitter. From the social media handbook, here is how an army-man ought to tweet:

Do: * Live Tweet events
* Use hashtags in every Tweet by searching for established hashtags or creating your own
* Tweet breaking news related to your unit
* Tweet Army senior leader events
* Mix up your Tweet times Don’t: * Clutter all of your Tweets at one time
* Tweet on the hour (everyone does that)
* Be too promotional
* Let your Twitter account become stagnant (go more than a week without Tweeting)
* Obsess about the number of followers you have
* Add location to Tweets Remember: * Once a Tweet is out there, it is out there.

Whether or not you are military personnel, this is a pretty substantial list, (even after I abbreviated it for this post). While a few of these aren’t applicable to civilians on the interweb, just keep that last Remember: close in mind and heart. Sites like Facebook and Badoo are increasing in numbers of profiles by hundreds-of-thousands per diem — with about one sixth of those being false — and while these big sites are doing their best to delete the fakes, definitely remember: A friend request from an unknown babe might be tempting, but it might also be the biggest threat to homeland security we know.