Mike Rosenblum, the godfather of video journalism, has an interesting post on Facebook and its potential use by intelligence agencies as a means of mapping networks. I’m sure he doesn’t quite mean to go as far as this quote suggests, but you will get his drift:

A few days ago, I typed in the name al-Sudari. This is the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the direct descendants of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, the country he named after himself. Well, lo and behold, there are lots of members of the Saudi Royal Family on Facebook!

Lots of princes…and princesses. Go do it yourself. Now, if you start to follow the links and check out ‘friends’ of ‘friends’ it starts to present a fascinating look into the ruling family of the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There are more than 100,000 ‘friends’ in the ‘Saudi Arabia’ group alone. And there are lots of other ones.

The first thing you will notice is, it is not very Islamic … In fact, the deeper you go, the less it looks like The Islamic Kingdom and the more it looks like Beverly Hills 90210…on steroids.

Now, I am no CIA analyst, but I think there is something here worth paying attention to.

Something very strange is going on in The Kingdom.

My guess is that there are not too many CIA operatives on Facebook, or who even know what it is.

Given that the CIA has already advertised for recruits on Facebook, and that numerous conspiracy theories connect the agency to its funding (cue lots of groups on Facebook), Mike is being a little pessimistic. (Though maybe they struggle on MySpace.)

With the usefulness of social network maps in tracking links between key individuals (and its potential dangers in suggesting connections where they’re absent) I would imagine every intelligence agency worth the name is using Facebook – effectively a huge voluntary disclosure resource – not least because it can capture links before radicalisation.

In a piece picked up by Munir Umrani, Saudi journalist Mshari Al-Zaydi highlights a growing awareness of the dangers of online radicalism in the Kingdom:

To a large extent, Al Qaeda is a by-product of the internet after it made its entire literature and books available online.

Al-Zaydi begins his piece with a fascinating vignette of an advert produced (so he says) by the Saudi Intelligence Service:

A group of men were playing the popular Saudi card game ‘Baloot’ when at the peak of the game one of them asked another, “Where is your son?”

“Surfing the internet,” he answered, nonchalantly.

“How could you leave him alone to surf the internet?” he asked, “Do you have any idea what websites he is browsing?”

“What can I do?” the father helplessly asked, “It is the language of the age.”

Cut to a scene in which the father leans over his son’s shoulder to look at the computer screen with an affectionate paternal smile.

This is one of the television advertisements that were launched by the Saudi Intelligence Service in the information technology (IT) campaign, which helped pave the way for an ‘open’ conference entitled “Information Technology and National Security.” The conference was held at the King Fahd Cultural Centre in Riyadh at the beginning of this month.

The aforementioned advertisement reflects the aspect that the Saudi Intelligence Service seeks to highlight and make Saudi families aware of, which is the window that the internet offers and through which fundamentalist and Al Qaeda youth are able to communicate away from the eyes of general censorship.

It is also a window for progressive conversations. Let’s hope they’re just on Facebook.