I suppose the name “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information” sounds a whole lot better than “Air Force Eye Command Group for the Pilfering of your Myspace Pages.” Either way, the new $450,000 blog-snooping project recently hatched up by the US Airforce seems really creepy and massively Orwelien.

The Air Force maintains the purpose of the investigation is to better understand how blogs work, what subjects people write about and blogs’ power to influence international uprisings, such as the furor over the Danish anti-Moslem cartoons. Yes, but I can’t help but picture men in black suits and fedoras sifting through digital photos of college students at keg parties and reading rambling posts about The Shins and new Mac Books at 2 o’clock in the morning.

Oh, wait. That’s a different programme.

The US National Security Agency is conducting a “mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks”. By trawling through web sites such as Myspace, Friendster and Facebook, the organisation could be collecting the knowledge to create a future database of people’s interests that could be combined with banking, retail and property records to become a group of all-inclusive government files on citizens. (These details could, of course, be added to the current NSA logs of citizens’ phone calls.)

Another goal of the NSA’s snooping project is to analyze the “friends” web surfers make through online social networks. By collecting this information, the government can track people with the same interests, such as skipping rocks in the lake, folding oragami swans, or flying planes into New York City skyscrapers.

Beware bloggers - the US government has finally learned our secret. They’ve found out we are all tough, iron-pumping, dozen-eggs-for-breakfast-eating, bomb-belt-wearing, key-board-wielding, leftist maniacs.

Or maybe they have just never heard of Technorati.