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Student spy Maureen Robinson used a false Facebook identity (Nathalie Page) to infiltrate student activist electronic lists and discussion groups. This appears to show that both the Dean of Science and Legal Counsel Flaherty knew that Maureen Robinson was using a false identity to infiltrate activist student groups in order to provide them information while acting as “agent of Legal Counsel”. DOC-8 shows the student spy informing the Dean of Science and Legal Counsel that she is using her media connections to attempt to secure a voice recording of a coming talk by the spied-on professor at a student conference.

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"In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

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