CIA Investing in Company to Monitor Your Blog and Tweets?
Per this new article on Wired, the CIA is using its relationship with In-Q-Tel to buy into a company called Visible Technologies. Visible Technologies is a software company that specializes in monitoring the social web, including Twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and others.
In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Good idea? We think so. The ability to communicate quickly via social networks is no doubt an attractive prospect to terrorists. By compiling data, seeing trends, and possibly getting early warnings, the U.S. intelligence community is smart to jump into this game early.
Comment Archive
Great, report what the CIA is doing and then the terrorists, or others, will stop using social networks, making it increasing more difficult to figure out what the terrorists are doing.
I second Jeff. Unless the CIA is trying to use a reverse psychology here.