So, aside from the discussion around the journalistic standards of the Sun, now the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring the twitter accounts of British citizens?
Furthermore, how did DHS match up a twitter handle with a passport number?
That's the sort of discussion I'd love to hear. There's surprisingly little about the privacy ramifications here of somehow associating real people to an online account.
Granted, the tech exists. Google has been doing it for a while now. Anyone who's gotten the little "is this you?" thing when doing a search knows what I'm talking about.
I wonder how many false positives happen with these match ups. Or if the people in question could have just denied that they made the tweets.
This also makes me super freaked out about Google+'s real names policy, since it will literally be providing the United States Government with a massive surveillance network.
Facebook is much more lenient with fake names, and it's much less of a risk for a user to have a fake name on Facebook--all that get's deactivated with if a fake name gets caught is the Facebook account, not their Gmail or any other services.
True, if caught with a fake name, your @facebook.com e-mail will probably be deactivated, but not as many people use @facebook.com as do @gmail.com
Furthermore, how did DHS match up a twitter handle with a passport number?