Social Media and the CIA – Big Brother is Watching
Traditionally, most spy agencies relied on secret satellites and clandestine agents but now the CIA wants to monitor “open source” intelligence. That is, bites taken from newspapers, TV shows and Internet postings.
The company that keeps the CIA and US Intelligence Community equipped with current technology, In-Q-Tel, has recently announced its partnership with Visible Technologies, a social media analysis company. This is a part of the CIA’s effort to keep tabs on the publicly available “open source” intelligence that gets surfed over the social media waves.
As early as 2006, the CIA recognized the power of social networking site when it had a recruiting campaign on Facebook complete with a promotional YouTube video.
Visible Technologies uses crawlers to creep through the mirage of websites, over half a million sites daily. Based on a series of key words, online forums, blog postings, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon reviews are surfed and scraped to get real-time feeds of what is being posted and talked about.
The CIA is not the only agency using this technology. Visible is already keeping tabs on sites from domestic bloggers and tweeters for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. Microsoft is monitoring on the success of its Windows 7 program.
Wow…. the CIA is using the Internet to research/monitor people. How surprising!
Seriously; if they weren’t, we’d be calling them dolts! What exactly is the nightmare scenario you envision here? What’s on our blogs or newspaper articles that’s too private for the CIA to have access to?
Seriously, all of this paranoia from so-called security experts (implied or stated) is starting to make me grumpy.