Is the Federal Government on Your Friends List?

Been poked by a Fed lately? Not the usual question on a Twitter feed or Facebook wall...until today. Newly released documents show that Big Brother really does exist and, hey, social networker, he's looking at you.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the San Francisco-based civil liberties group, has published new documents showing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) turned to social media to protect the president and sniff out fraud, going so far as to create a separate entity to track the online world and giving special agents free rein to friend, poke and Tweet away.

The new documents show DHS set up a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” in 2008 to track online activity and look for “items of interest” on social media sites during the inauguration of then president-elect Obama.

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