A top secret plan by the US government to monitor social notworking sites has been uncovered amongst emails of security outfits hacked by Anonymous.

The Guardian has been working its way through the HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico, whose emails show the outfits bidding for a project called Odyssey. The programme uses natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion to snuffle out information on social notworking sites, particularly in the Middle East.

What is spooky is that the people putting together the contract included Aaron Barr, who was the former CEO of HBGary Federal. He wanted to flog these high-end intelligence capabilities to private companies.

The Guardian said that the emails are only known about because of the antics of hackers who the authorities are trying to shut down.