CIA Buys Stake in Company to Monitor Me (Danger Room)

[Drew Wilson]

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

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OK, not me in particular, but people who post stuff publicly.

Either way, monitor this: :booty:

[mountain_rage]

So long as they don't start making assumptions on the data itself I see nothing wrong with this, there is no expectation of privacy on these sites. A,K.A the data obtained should not be seen as just cause, but if there is just cause for concern there is nothing wrong with analyzing public information disclosed by the individual.