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

[Interoperable]

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

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

[sopssa]

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

!Anonymous.

[Tubal-Cain]

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt...

Anonymous to us, maybe...

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.

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.

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.

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.