I think it is fair to assume that the US Intelligence Community is likely to work pretty hard to conceal or obfuscate their best methods of open source intellig

I think it is fair to assume that the US Intelligence Community is likely to work pretty hard to conceal or obfuscate their best methods of open source intelligence gathering. Public documentation of such extrajudicial operations is likely to be heavily discouraged, and through the patriot act tools like NSL's are available to enforce that. Consider the warrantless wiretapping program that went on for 5+ years. We know that tools for court ordered intercepts were in place through CALEA and others. We also know that the telcos were told and accepted that FISA warrants were not needed for this monitoring. Similarly, we know that facebook obviously has tools in place for responding to warrants, and that it is probably true that facebook can legally reveal much/all of your account if they want to without a warrant. Facebook is quite likely to view building a friendly relationship with the IC to be beneficial. Another way to think about it: Intelligence agencies strongly discourage the use of social networking applications both by their own employees and other federal agents. I find it completely credible that any number of friendly and hostile intelligence agencies and security services have widespread access to facebook data and other social networking sites through a variety of means. It's unlikely to be as ham handed as the https://dni.facebook.com/ https://dni.facebook.com/ you might imagine, but it's most assuredly there. It's simply too attractive to not be.