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

[AliasMarlowe]

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

Just copying the Brits. They've been referring to many kinds of government spending as "investment" for years now - even chunks of the welfare system. The debasement of the English language proceeds apace, on both sides of the Atlantic...

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

[mayko]

What they really need is an "investment brain."

Re:Can somebody tell me

[Interoperable]

Just in case Visible Technologies crawls /. looking for it's own name: Fuck Off

Re:Can somebody tell me

[Thanshin]

Just in case Visible Technologies crawls /. looking for it's own name: Fuck Off

Salutations from a common SLASHDOT.ORG entity,

Do you mind if I ask you a question?

How influential are you among the other entities of SLASHDOT.ORG.

Thank you.

Re:Can somebody tell me

[TheCarp]

You may also wonder why they needed to illegally . Or perhaps you might wonder why they would dose "their own" citizens with LSD

I think Zack De La Rocha, The Last Emperor & KRS-ONE said it best in their track "CIA"
"Need I say the C.I.A. be criminals in action"

But given that the same song said that "President Clinton should delete them", I guess it wasn't as popular as it could have been :) and sadly, since 9/11 they are actually percieved to have a job again. A front job is always a very good thing for a criminal. Nothing like an air of legitimacy to hide criminal minds.

-Steve

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.

Re:Can somebody tell me

[sopssa]

Psst.. Visible Technologies, please do something about the Anonymous Coward bastard.. he's such a troll in every freaking thread.

Re:Can somebody tell me

[inviolet]

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.

Probably not a good example to use in illustrating your point. Dealing with Medicare billing is such a gigantic heartache that doctors' offices who do so, and they are a small minority, will have to hire at least one specialized clerk just for that purpose. In this sense, Medicare is shifting its overhead onto its customers. Whereas private insurance is required, by competition, to be reasonably easy for all parties to deal with.

Regading your "fraud!" quip, I think the problem lies in our mistaken belief that "health insurance" = "health plan", and the subsequent chaotic conversion of the industry from the former to the latter. I would prefer to have health insurance, which is much cheaper than a "free zyrtec!" must-carry monstrosity whose sole purpose is to shift the cost of unhealthy people onto healthy people.

!Anonymous.

[Tubal-Cain]

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt...

Anonymous to us, maybe...

Re:!Anonymous.

[snspdaarf]

"The other day, upon the stair, I met a man, who wasn't there...."

forget privacy, it's a waste of money

[Red Flayer]

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.)

Seems like a redundant effort. Why not just check the author's karma on slashdot?

Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right? Right?

Re:forget privacy, it's a waste of money

[AJWM]

Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right?

Well, it would, but your user number has too many digits.

Re:forget privacy, it's a waste of money

[bill_mcgonigle]

Well, it would, but your user number has too many digits.

Eh, you can't really blame him - some of us held out for a long time, thinking the Internet would always be anonymous. But then they made it so you didn't have to preview if you were logged in...

Re:forget privacy, it's a waste of money

[zoloto]

Considering he's created this site to foster tech-specific talk over 10 years ago instead of releasing press releases or blog with anecdotal chatter...

Why is this considered an YRO issue?

[Drummergeek0]

This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.

Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.

The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.

Re:Why is this considered an YRO issue?

[idontgno]

Reading publicly-posted comments is not a problem. At least, not to me. (I do know some thickies that are shocked, SHOCKED, that someone besides their BFFs can read their social networking crap.) Anyways, sure, public posting is public. Even lolcat knows that.

But agencies of state power reading, aggregating, correlating, and scoring... drawing secret conclusions based on hidden agendas and closed criteria... that's disturbing. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover's secret file cabinet and COINTELPRO and the basement of Stasi HQ.

This sounds naive, but on principle this should be opt-in only. If this were for marketing purposes, it certainly would be. But for stuff which actually matters (life, liberty, et al.), it's beginning to look like non-participation is the only opt-out. And the chilling effect is as effective as any active anti-dissent measure.

Re:Why is this considered an YRO issue?

[causality]

This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.

Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.

The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.

I'll explain that with a hypothetical analogy. There's nothing wrong with a person who can see your house from the public street. You knew it was a public road before you built a house near it, after all. However, you might find it a bit unsettling if the same van is always parked on that road and its occupant is always watching your house day and night. You might find it downright alarming if you noticed that he was videotaping your premises and taking notes about your daily activities. You might wonder what he plans to do with that information. You might be unable to come up with any good or desirable uses, but able to see a ton of abuse potential for it. But by your logic above, that should be okay because you had no expectation of privacy for anything you make visible from a public street, right?

In meatspace we do tend to draw a line between someone who happens to drive on that road and happens to glance at your premises, and someone who acts like a malicious stalker. There's a very good reason for that. The reason is not dictated by the special needs of meatspace; it is not the result of the law of gravity or the law of magnetism. No, the reason is rooted in sound principle. Principle is an abstract thing that applies equally to the streets and the Internet. I realize it's trendy for officials and such to act like we've never faced any of these questions before merely because a computer is involved, but it's not necessary.

The moment your creative output is collected, tagged, and studied, you become an object of study. It's a rather demeaning status when it's done for no good reason and occurs against your will, and by people who frankly don't give a damn about you. I see one major use of this system and it's not a good one.

In a truly representative government, the government changes over time to meet the changing needs of the people. The nature of that change depends on the people themselves and in this way it's a natural change, not an engineered one. Predicting it, for example to capitalize on it, always has some element of chance. This is a "problem" for people who think they should be holding the reins.

So they come up with systems like this one. Now they can quantify things like political influence and find out, with fine precision, where it comes from and who possesses it. What would have taken a massive propaganda effort in the past can now be done with just a little "push" at just the right place. Do some of you ever wonder where the restrictions came from that prohibit the CIA from spying on Americans? Do you imagine they are a product of chance? This is, after all, a method of circumventing those restrictions.

Re:Why is this considered an YRO issue?

[causality]

The only problem I see with that analogy is that you are saying it is someone watching everything I do, and only me. While monitoring the blogs can lead to that, I would see this as a van that drives through my neighborhood everyday, taken pictures of the houses. While still a little unsettling, all they are really going to see is what I put out for them to see.

So surveillence is only bad when it's personal? I can't get behind that. There is no principle in it, there is only the consideration of whether you alone will have to bear the burden of it. While it may make you feel more equal to know that everyone else is being treated the same shitty way that you are, with no regard for their privacy, it's still no excuse to treat people that way.

To me, the idea that the CIA can personally spy on you and only you is bothersome. The idea that it's just as easy for them to spy on many people at once is even worse. It's not an improvement, not if you don't wish to see intelligence agencies engaging in domestic spying and data mining. If you love freedom and understand a thing or two about how it is compromised, then there are two concerns here. One is that such a system can target individuals.

The other concern is that it indicates a government agency that is able and willing to overstep its bounds. Your comfort that they are not personally targetting you does not help with this one. These are not people who respect the limitations under which they are expected to work or the liberties those are designed to safeguard. Rather, they view those limitations as obstacles or challenges, to be disposed of as soon as possible and by any means necessary. Any excuse will do; "safety" is a popular one.

While it is easy for them to see who lives in a particular house based on the address, it is a completely different scenario to know that all around, and still have any meaningful information. The amount of manpower it would take to tie a real 'meatspace' individual to their cyberspace id is pretty high and would take a considerable amount of time to do it for everyone they monitor.

Yes, it would take a lot of manpower. So they are doing their best to automate the process, to offload as much of that effort onto sophisticated machines as they possibly can. Such as the ones this firm is using. In other words, the CIA seems to agree with you and is obviously doing everything it can about the "problem" of how difficult it is to spy on everyone.

What, did you think they would just give up?

I feel sorry for the crawler

[Interoperable]

The crawler is going to get seriously depressed if it crawls YouTube conversations.

Here's why

[NoYob]

1. To promote technologies that will add to the CIA's arsenal.
2. To buy into companies that allow them to circumnavigate Constitutional provisions against spying on American citizens.

For example, the second one, the CIA loves companies like this one and the credit bureaus because they can legally collect information on private citizens. Then the CIA "buys" the information from them and they can go to Congress and say, "Nope! We are NOT spying on Americans." - at least that's the answer to the Congressmen that aren't afraid to appear to be "weak on terrorism" or afraid to be lambasted by ignorant talk show hosts.

Re:Here's why

[DutchUncle]

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.

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?

Datamining Social Media

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a TON of companies that are trying to datamine social media for a variety of reasons- I'm posting anonymously because I work for a company that makes one of these products.

What is interesting is companies that make consumer products all want these tools to be able to track the companies interaction with the consumer- these companies are specifically replying back to specific posters in order to stop the spread of what they call "misinformation", but in actuality is just anything where the company is painted in a bad light. Let me be clear: Corporate America wants to control everything that is said online, and the tools to do it are starting to show up. Companies are starting to employ people whose soul job is to look at social media and respond to negative comments.

I predict not far in the future there is going to be a push for owners of social media sites to have some control over who can index their content.

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:Troubling technology

[TarPitt]

This is already going on.

Some companies make big money via Astroturfing:

Has Netvocates visited your blog recently

Many bloggers are starting to notice some new referrals from a company called “NetVocates” (mine showed up as coming from arrca.netvocates.com to be specific).

I recently invited a guest blogger (who writes under the pseudonym D. Sirmize) to share his political opinions on my blog. I began to get hits (55 to date) from NetVocates a couple days after his first political post. It would seem that whatever they’re currently looking at is based on opinions of a political nature.

More from http://wordsnotfists.blogspot.com/2006/06/another-inconvenient-truth-netvocates.html and of course you can look up Netvocates' own Web site, where they are strikingly open about their PR efforts

It doesn't touch closed social networks . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

(It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.)

More like, they're not admitting touching them . . . at the moment.

Visible moderation

[zapakh]

+1 Influential

Re:Domestic spying?

[sexybomber]

I thought the CIA wasn't allowed to do domestic intelligence?

They're not, but do you think that's going to be a serious impediment to them doing so anyway? First off, they're going to be trying really hard to keep their intelligence gathering a secret, so you probably won't know that they're doing it in the first place. Secondly, even if you did find out about it, what are you going to do? Sue? They'll claim state-secrets privilege within a couple minutes of you filing your complaint. Now you can't do discovery, and there goes your case.

Point being, "allowed to" is a complete non-issue here. They're going to do what they want, when they want, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Re:positive or negative, mixed or neutral based on

[jamstar7]

I imagine a post would go something like:

[Deity/] himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of [Deity/]. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. [Deity/] wills it!

And for 100 extra points, which Catholic pope of the 1100s said that to whip up support for a Crusade? Fanaticism isn't restricted to Islam, you know...

Halfasec, there's a knock on my do..

Obviously

[mollog]

Yes, I know that organizations are 'astroturfing'. That is why I used the term 'turf'. That's been going on for quite some time.

What's new and different is governmental use of automated tools. Would it not be fair to assume that secret government agencies, already enjoying unconstitutional immunity, would use these tools to effectively destroy groups who, for example, seek to put limits on the powers of secret government agencies?

And would it not be smart to assume that these tools will be used by politically motivated groups to shout down those brave souls who attempt to stand up for rights of individuals?

We already have media networks (Fox) pushing political agendas. Tools like this will surely be used to push those narrow agendas at the expense of free speech.

Re:What no backdoor into Windows ??

[hey]

> I'm sure they can datamine beyond any privacy settings.

Probably. But I wonder how.