It's somewhat unfortunate that technology is moving a lot faster than the law can keep up with. Among some groups of people, Facebook is essentially the modern-day version of the phone network: how they do their routine communication. But the phone network has a bunch of legal protections, e.g. if the police want to listen in on some conversations they need a warrant, <i>even if</i> the phone company were willing to sell them a wiretap without a warrant (that's why the warrantless-wiretapping scandal was a scandal). But Facebook is currently just treated as a simple case of a company that has some information, which the government can purchase if it wishes.
"...helping legislators and intelligence agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work."<p>Hmmm...I wonder what "regular line of work" Facebook is helping the CIA with.
Heh. Many people believe that Facebook was founded by people from the CIA, which would make perfect sense for them to reach back.<p>See <a href="http://www.itsecurity.com/features/cia-facebook-conspiracy-092007/" rel="nofollow">http://www.itsecurity.com/features/cia-facebook-conspiracy-0...</a> for a reasonably balanced take on that theory.