The U.S. Department of Homeland Security monitored social networking sites to harvest information – described as “items of interest” — during the lead up to Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The existence of the surveillance program is laid out in a set of slides obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF and the University of California, Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic last year filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against six government agencies in response to news articles reporting government monitoring of social networks.

In the document, DHS details how it would collect and use social network information. It also refers to privacy guidelines it would employ as its operatives went about gathering data for what it called its Social Networking Monitoring Center or (SNMC.) The target list reads like a “Who’s Who” of the most popular social networking sites, including the likes of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and CraigsList, among others

via Homeland Security Harvested Social Network Data – Tech Talk – CBS News.