CIA Tapping Social Media
October 27, 2009 by Gainesville Detailing
As if we did not have enough big brother to worry about we now have the Intelligence arm of the United States Government investing in Social Media. Cia on Twitter? Surveillance in 140 characters or less? The CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, recently invested into Visible Technologies. Visible Technologies is a company that tracks what is happening in the Social Media community. According to their senior VP Blake Cahil their TruCast Engine “casts a net on whatever the client wants to know more about,”. Just what we need is the CIA casting anymore nets on anything. 
Using this technology will allow them to monitor any of the social networking sites that do not have user defined privacy controls, such as Facebook and Myspace. This is different than them using the Visible Technologie’s service independently. They actually invested in the company. Investing usually means you have a form of ownership. This would lead one to believe that maybe they will have some form of influence on future projects that Visible Technologies takes on. This is only the tip of the iceberg, In-Q-Tel has invested in multiple different companies that use the world wide web to mine the immense data available and make sense of it. One of the more notable investments is with Keyhole. Keyhole is the one who developed the foundation technology that is currently in place with Google Maps. Of course the term’s of the deal were not disclosed as of yet. Hey isnt In-Q-Tel part of the CIA, who is part of the U.S. government, who is allegedly owned by the people? Funny we never exactly how much of our money is spent on this.
All in all it shouldn’t mean much of anything, except that the CIA has to outsource what it cannot seem to do on its own. The social web is expanding at a rate that is hard to keep up with, although it seems to be increasingly more regulated. No one should really lose any sleep over this, unless you are doing something to get on the CIA’s radar. If you are doing something to be on the CIA’s radar then social media monitoring is that last thing you should be worried about.
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