Orkut now has Warplans!

Orkut is being used for a lot of things today.None of which are related to social networking. Advertising, Spamming, Breeding ground to Illegal downloads, Malicious softwares, Hate communities, Political propaganda. One of the topics brought to light recently was the discussion of sensitive and confidential topics relating to national security. This is a matter of grave concern. With advancements in technology, services such a Google Earth has made it possible for every teenager to peek into neighboring country borders having such a volatile and popular platform such as Orkut to discuss matters of national security is cause for concern.

I decided to investigate the matter myself. The search keyword indian air force has 132 community results while indian army has 322 communities. Most of these communities seem innocuous on the surface. Lot of communities are filled with commercial links/spam – but thats the case with every community (poor moderation). However there are some communities which have topics discussing confidential matters such as Aircraft specifications, technical data, missile details etc. There are topics titled “News” which are flooded with internal information. While many such community owners and member participants, who are serving personnels, will argue that this is harmless debate, I beg to differ. With IT specialists working for government agencies today swarming and crawling the internet hunting for bits and pieces of information like scavenger wolves, giving out even the tiniest bit of lead can prove fatal and cause serious repercussions.

I further looked up the keywrods USAF on facebook and myspace. The results were totally off track with search resulting in either previous batches or support groups. None discussing internal affairs. So what can we do about this? To start with the defence forces need to have strong moderating team for Sensitive Internet Content. The personnel must be cautioned against such activities and be educated about threats online. Any personnel found indulging in such activates must be warned.
We are all for freedom of speech, but when it leads to revealing sensitive information concerning national security we must put an end to it. In an attempt we can form an Content Censoring group and hope to reduce the leak of sensitive information.