Follow the Money

I'd no idea the CIA and US intelligence community were in the investment business:

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

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.

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...

I'm not sure what to think of this particular bit of news for several reasons. First, the CIA has an investment arm? Secondly, this technology is dedicated to scanning publicly accessible information online--thereby seeming to place it in the range of, say, spooks reading newspapers and magazines or watching TV. Sure, the range of data read and assimilated will be huge--but again, it's open-source. Thirdly, doesn't this smack just a little of Big Brother watching you?