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CIA Is Investing Heavily In Firms That Do Social Media Mining and Surveillance (theintercept.com)

Posted by msmash on from the mining-and-surveillance-for-"good" dept.

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.

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. The lines... by messymerry · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The lines between corporations and government are getting blurrier by the day. Those with an ear, let them hear...

    --
    Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
  2. I've been saying this for years! by Archeopteryx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We get all bent out of shape when the NSA collects nearly useless phone records, and then give every secret in our lives to Facebook, Google, and Yahoo without a care!

    --
    Dog is my co-pilot.
  3. Re:How is Docker social media related? by rockmuelle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Docker has introduced some wonderful security holes into the cloud ecosystem. Given its heavy use in many environments (and downstream use by well meaning individual users), it provides a wonderful backdoor that intelligence agencies will have access to for years to come.

    Even without the obvious root filesystem access issue (which Docker likes to brush aside as "well, you can do that with a VM, too"), there are still thousands of Docker images out there running unpatched versions of libraries.

    -Chris