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Lee Fang, reporting for The Intercept, lists more than three-dozen companies that have received funding from CIA. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm, the publication claims, has invested in 38 companies that research on "social media mining and surveillance." The unpublicized In-Q-Tel companies are: Aquifi, Beartooth, CliQr, CloudPassage, Databricks, Dataminr, Docker, Echodyne, Epiq Solutions, Geofeedia, goTenna, Headspin, Interset, Keyssa, Kymeta, Lookout, Mapbox, Mesosphere, Nervana, Orbital Insight, Orion Labs, Parallel Wireless, PATHAR, Pneubotics, PsiKick, Rocket Lab, Skincential Sciences, Soft Robotics, Sonatype, Spaceflight Industries, Threatstream, Timbr.io, Transient Electronics, TransVoyant, TRX Systems, Voltaiq, and Zoomdata. From the report: Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel's technical staff, noted in a 2012 paper that "monitoring social media" is increasingly essential for government agencies (PDF) seeking to keep track of "erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends."CIA also recently funded Clearista, a skin care product company that collects DNA.

Nicola Hahn (1482985) writes Despite the long line of covert operations that Ed Snowden's documents have exposed, public outcry hasn't come anywhere near the level of social unrest that characterized the 1960s. Journalists like Conor Friedersdorf have suggested that one explanation for this is that the public is "informed by a press that treats officials who get caught lying and misleading (e.g., James Clapper and Keith Alexander) as if they're credible."

Certainly there are a number of well-known popular venues which offer a stage for spies to broadcast their messages from while simultaneously claiming to "cultivate conversations among all members of the security community, both public and private." This year, for instance, Black Hat USA will host Dan Greer (the CISO of In-Q-Tel) as a keynote speaker.

But after all of the lies and subterfuge is it even constructive to give voice to the talking points of intelligence officials? Or are they just muddying the water? As one observer put it, "high-profile members of the intelligence community like Cofer Black, Shawn Henry, Keith Alexander, and Dan Greer are positioned front and center in keynote slots, as if they were glamorous Hollywood celebrities. While those who value their civil liberties might opine that they should more aptly be treated like pariahs."

HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "AP reports that while confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could design a vacuum cleaner. After all KSM earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, the agency had no long-term plan for him, but might thought he might someday prove useful and might even stand trial one day and for that, he'd need to be sane. They were concerned that his long imprisonment might do so much psychological damage that he would no longer be useful as source for information. "We didn't want them to go nuts," said a former senior CIA official. So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances. It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist and even Mohammed's military lawyer, Jason Wright, says he is prohibited from discussing his client's interest in vacuums. 'It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger,' says Wright. So now, says Doug Mataconis, if you happen to start seeing ads for the CIA's revolutionary new home cleaning device, you'll know where it came from." Sounds perfect for In-Q-Tel.