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

Re:Can somebody tell me

[fulldecent]

>> [Can somebody tell me] Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"

Because work carried out in the private sector is more efficient than work carried out in the public sector.

See: http://news.google.com/news/search?q=state+pension+liabilities

Re:Why is this considered an YRO issue?

[Drummergeek0]

Because individualized personality profiles can be built of off seemingly innocuous data.

Sure they can, but unless you are posting information you don't want people to know or are trolling, why do you care. The same goes for talking to people in person. If you make speeches or comments regularly at a town hall meeting or a similar function, eventually the people in attendance will begin to know how you think and what your personality is. And that information will get to the people/organizations that the statements are about. I think something like this will help weed out the more clever trolls, and help make useful information more influential. Unless the CIA starts rolling out death/silencing squads I don't see any issue.

Like I said I think the only real issue is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.