CIA Invests In Firm That Datamines Social Networks

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "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... Visible Technologies 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. Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface."Apropos: Another anonymous reader points out an article making the point that users don't even realize how much private information they're sharing over these services.

Comments

Can somebody tell me

[mrdoogee]

Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"

Re:Can somebody tell me

[Tubal-Cain]

If you've got your own little money tree you aren't as tied to budgets set by someone else.

Re:Can somebody tell me

[LordKazan]

that statement is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false - corporations and the government are bureaucracies. Sometimes one is better, sometimes the other is.

For example the National Weather Service kicks the living crap out of every private company trying to do the same thing. They pay well, the recruit the best and brightest, they are managed by professionals with experience doing what their underlings do [something you often only can DREAM of in the corporate world or the government world].

Medicare is another example - it's operating overhead is 4%. The operating overhead of private "insurance" (sorry, it's fraud, not insurance anymore) is a whopping 30% MINIMUM.

On the other hand there are some things private industry IS better at doing, and the government quite often contracts out to these people - construction comes to mind, software development, etc.

The government, when run by skilled people, tends to be much better at private industry than doing things that are "natural monopolies" (police, fire, roads, water, etc) or things the profit-motive would harm [like insurance].

Re:Can somebody tell me

[megamerican]

What you don't understand is that part of the CIA has ALWAYS had an investment arm, even before the CIA and OSS existed. The CIA was born out of the private intelligence networks already well established by Wall Street, hence why so many of the early CIA was filled and run by Ivy League schools and Yale's Skull and Bones crowd.

The funny thing is Facebook has long since been implicated as being funded indirectly by In-Q-Tel.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Since 1947 the CIA and other intelligence activities have been more and more privatized. They have always used front companies. Search for the Northwoods Documents, which were authored in the late 1950's.

Many have argued that E.O 12333 privatized a lot of intelligence work. Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman if you want to know one reason why they do this.

This is really only news to people who don't pay attention.

!Anonymous.

[Tubal-Cain]

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt...

Anonymous to us, maybe...

Troubling technology

[mollog]

What troubles me about this is not the security applications, although there is risk there, too, but the political, persuasive abuse. Innocent sites like Slashdot will be 'turfed' to move public opinion and public perception.

I'll guess that this is already going on.

Re:Here's why

[causality]

So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.

Because they don't view the Bill of Rights as sound and enlightened principles to be honored wherever possible that happened to be enshrined in the Constitution. They view them as rules like any other. Then they note that either the rules don't apply to those private companies or they would be difficult to enforce, and for them, that's that. It's a mentality that is all about what is allowed or what can be gotten away with, rather than what is right or wrong.

I do have a more immediate question. If an average citizen hires a person to do something illegal, both the person and the one he hired can be charged with a crime. If it's illegal for the CIA to gather data on American citizens, why is it suddenly legal when they do the same thing by proxy? Why wouldn't both they and the company they hired be prosecuted for this?