CIA Invests in Social-Network Datamining
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, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Here’s the Visible Technologies press release on the funding.
Vincent • October 26, 2009 8:19 AM
Wired’s quotation of the term “open source intelligence” as though it were a neologism or a novel idea reflects some misunderstanding of the term and of what the agencies have always done. From the anecdotes of officers, I’ve gathered that a sizable portion of the nation’s intelligence gathering resources have always been devoted to open sources. You can learn a lot by reading a newspaper.
Anyhow, you’re going to hope that the intel services aren’t investing any more in the shallow, novel, sources than warranted. Social networks can be gamed. Entirely false and largely fabricated identities are constructed all the time for all sorts of reasons.