Tech | October 20, 2009 | 20 comments

CIA WANTS TO READ YOUR BLOG

source: http://www.assaultshirts.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c23...

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WhiteNoise
U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-...

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, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. http://www.iqt.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Visible 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.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”

But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,”

Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-...

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -George Orwell
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20 comments // CIA WANTS TO READ YOUR BLOG

  • tangibleparadox
  • WhiteNoise
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • CIA invests in firm that monitors Internet Blogs Twitter Amazon Youtube etc

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: So, the CIA, in 1999, set up an investment arm called In-Q-Tel that sort of makes investments in technologies that the spy agencies would like to see grow. And their latest investment is in this company called Visible, which basically takes blog posts and takes Twitter updates and takes comments on YouTube videos and sort of sorts them out and decides which people have the most weight in the blogosphere, which people are the most influential, and also filters out, you know, certain key words, decides whether certain posts are hostile or positive. And it’s basically a way for them to sort of keep track on what’s going on in Twitter, on the blogs, etc., etc.

      JUAN GONZALEZ: And who does this firm normally supply this information to?

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: Usually to companies like Microsoft. Right now they’re tracking the buzz on their Windows 7 release. They also do the work for Hormel, the processed meat company. When PETA was going after Hormel for some of their business practices, they kept track on the sort of anti-processed food activists. So it’s usually corporate clients, although there’s sort of a political spin to some of the work they do, as well.
      JUAN GONZALEZ: So, in essence, they’re sort of like an intelligence operation for the corporate world on a normal—

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: Yeah. They would say they try to spot trends and keep tabs on things, yeah.

      AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly. And then, how do people protect their privacy?

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: Well, first they protect their privacy by not tweeting or not blogging. I mean, that’s the way they would have to protect their privacy, or to do it within a closed password-protected system. If you leave it out there, not only is the government going to read it, but Microsoft and Google just signed deals with Twitter and Facebook yesterday, where all the—all your tweets and all your blog updates will be very easily searchable by either Microsoft’s Bing search engine or by Google.

      AMY GOODMAN: What’s the deal?

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: The deal is basically that all your Facebook updates will be sort of fed into Microsoft’s new search engine, and people will be able to see what you post on Facebook or Twitter, or what have you.

      JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, for the CIA, given the fact—the recent reports of how tweets and other social networking are used around the world sometimes to give advance notice on popular insurrections or—

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: Mm-hmm.

      JUAN GONZALEZ: For the CIA, this would be a sort of a normal direction for them to take, if they want to collect more intelligence.

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: It would be. They’re probably already doing so, but just in a less elegant way. So this is probably—for them, they view it as a smarter way to get information they’re already interested in. The question is whether it’s aimed out at international audiences or whether it’s aimed in at domestic ones.

      JUAN GONZALEZ: Can the CIA conduct surveillance of Americans at home here, in terms of their communications?

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: Well, they’re not supposed to. But, I mean, given the recent history of the US intelligence agencies looking inward as well as outward, it’s tough to imagine they wouldn’t.

      NOAH SHACHTMAN: The way Visible works is it kind of grabs all the blogs and all the tweets out there, then it sorts for certain key words, it sorts for a sentiment about whether things are positive or negative, and then it also sorts based on which bloggers and which tweeters are really important or not. And you can sort of see over time how a conversation develops.

      Technology then allows companies or the government to respond directly within a blog or within a Facebook page to those people. So, who knows? The commenter—the next commenter on your blog might be the CIA.

      “Conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.” – Gore Vidal

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
  • spacemikey
    • 0
      spacemikey [removed]  

    • Potentially scary stuff, I was reading a similar article elsewhere stating;

      "Its platform delivers a clear and comprehensive view of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue.". from;

      http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/947002/CIA-invests-social-media-monitoring-com...

      That ability in the wrong hands, to be able to analyze context and tone in real time, on a massive scale....

      That's real Orwellian crap there. Thought criminals beware, god forbid you have one too many in the privacy of your own home, log on to your blog spot and go into a rant.

      There is a real solution though, flood their system all the time. Stay busy writing so much anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian stuff they can't keep up. What with 2 thirds of the internet, pissed off at the system, and the other third interacting with them all the time blurring the lines?

      What's the CIA gonna do? Go back to dealing drugs and STFU if they know what's good for them... They're still outnumbered....

    • 2 years ago
  • tangibleparadox
  • WhiteNoise
  • onechance
    • 0
      onechance  

    • They've been doing this crap for as long as information has been circulating. That's just how America runs. Sucks, but it's true. Meanwhile, crimes continue, unpunished, by the people that are friendly to these very forms of "law enforcement"...
      Godless America

    • 2 years ago
  • blood77
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • If I read you well you are asking : Why is the dog not chasing his tail ;)

      "We are watching a poorly staged rendition of 'Wag the Dog' , interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane." - Jules Carlysle

      Also...

      “At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, ‘Oh, sure, all the time.” PS : Check out Carl Bernstein’s 1970s Rolling Stone article on the CIA’s stranglehold on the US media, which has gotten far worse since then:
      http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html

      In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. Frank Church - Church was a key figure in American foreign policy during the 1970s, and served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1979 to 1981.

      Lifted from a blog ;)

      Look at American history since 1963: the assassination of the Kennedys, Dr King, most of the Black Panther leadership and Jimmy Hoffa; the shooting of Governor George Wallace. The revelation of CIA plots against foreign leaders. Massive domestic surveillance and disruption programs by the FBI and CIA. The CIA shipping opium in Laos and Vietnam, organising forty, fifty thousand assassinations in Vietnam under the Phoenix programme; tens of thousand more in Indonesia. Secret wars all round the globe trying to police the US empire. All this began to emerge in the 1960s after the destruction of the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK and the revelations continued through the 1970s as part of the spin-off from Watergate. Since the advent of Republican administrations in the eighties we've had Irancontra; the October Surprise; the clandestine arming of Iraq; billions of dollars ripped-off from the Savings and Loan banks; hundreds of thousand of corpses in Central America — including a few American nuns — created by death squad regimes working as US proxy governments. A vast military-industrial-intelligence complex — everything President Eisenhower warned America of in his farewell speech in 1960 — totally beyond democratic control, gobbling up hundreds of billions of dollars.
      It's ALL lies. Everything.

      So-called "democratic" electoral choices are based on political lies. So-called "free market" purchasing selections are based on marketing lies. So-called "religious freedom" is based on dogmatic lies.

      We live in a world where our choices are meaningless because they are all based on the false propaganda of the "elite" few and we accept it because we're not permitted even to glimpse any other possibility. Nor are most of us inclined to abandon the comfortable "matrix" of the illusion.
      Arvy | 04.05.09 - 12:07 pm | #

      “Conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.” – Gore Vidal

    • 2 years ago
  • elementaljim
    • 0
      elementaljim  

    • One aspect of this search for information that really burns my ass is that with all the intrusive effort; illegal wiretaps, top secret data mining @ at&t; no one has come forth with anything that would help prosecute and incarcerate Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Gonzales or any of the other miscreants from BushCo.
      EIGHT YEARS of lies, deception, destroyed documents & emails! Nothin', nada, zip!
      Yea sure they have info on some peace niks planning to protest the war but absolutely nothing on the pricks that orchestrated a preemptive occupation of a sovereign country.
      The CIA.. Intelligence agency?... Really?..

      I get between 2-5 visitors a day on my poor little blog.
      So now you're telling me half of it could be "Intelligence" gathering.. Funny..

      http://opinionsandreasons.blogspot.com/

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
  • reactionforce
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • Varex_Sythe
      Indeed, the idea here is to read ALL the blogs, which would definitively qualify as torture & that's AGAINST THE LAW ;)

      Echelon does audio,
      Among other things...

      * Traffic analysis, keyword recognition, text retrieval, and topic analysis
      * Speech recognition systems
      * Continuous speech recognition
      * Speaker identification and other voice message selection techniques

      So e-mail is kid stuff ;)
      http://www.infowar-monitor.net/

    • 2 years ago
  • pjacobs51
    • 0
      pjacobs51  
    • Image

    • "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

      ~ Alice

    • 2 years ago
  • SeaJade
  • Varex_Sythe
    • 0
      Varex_Sythe  

    • No offense meant, but aren't blogs usually open for any public person to read?

      If that is the case, then who cares?

      Now e-mail on the other hand, that I think should require a warrant to read, like regular mail.

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
  • LadybugLady
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • The more things change...
      BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY 2
      a blast from the past / May 02, 2007

      “If you are afraid to speak out, you are not in America any more” - unknown

    • 2 years ago
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