Via Zone-H.org -
Do you fancy a career as an agent at the CIA? Do you long to enter international plots and special investigations? If you are a member of the social networking web site Facebook.com your “job-opportunity” could be only one click away.
As reported this morning by the web magazine Wired.com, the Central Intelligence Agency has been using Facebook to recruit employees that should work at the National Clandestine Service (NCS) .
The NCS is one of the four directorates of the CIA. It was established after 9/11 to gather intelligence from sources both domestic and abroad. President Bush itself have recently urged the Agency to increase its personnel and specifically to hire officers that could "blend more easily in foreign cities."
This search for new members lead to the creation of a specific CIA’s Facebook page, a restricted area providing details about job opportunities at the NCS and showing a promotional YouTube video . The page appeared for the first time on December 19th, 2006 and it now counts more than 2100 members.
The website wasn’t chosen by chance: CIA’s sponsored page has been clearly studied to hit the attention of young people and Facebook users are mostly college students. Many other companies have used this medium to get in touch with potential employees but CIA’s initiative marks a turning point for governmental agencies, which are usually limited by strict regulations about personnel hiring. Yet, the CIA has its own hiring authority and isn't audited by other governmental structures.
Even if at the moment the CIA is the only Agency to use social networks for recruitment, web-based “head hunters” could soon be adopted by other structures. However the interaction between social networks and government is quite distrusted by social network users who are concerned about their privacy.
Anyway Facebook’s spokesmen claimed that direct access to user’s profile is forbidden, and as it was pointed out by Michele Neff, a CIA spokeswoman, the page is only for information purposes, and : "There is no collection of names, bio information or resume collection from this site, nor do we engage members in any way."
We could now start an endless debate about all the implications of similar initiatives for users’ privacy but we’d rather focus on a little, funny, maybe silly consideration: online recruitment and promotional videos has been used for the first time by “another” organization. Al Qaeda.
How small the (cyber) world is!
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