Posted on 10/20/2009 9:11:41 AM PDT by justlurking
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt 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... Visible Technologies 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at yro.slashdot.org ...
I wonder if FreeRepublic.com is one of the sites they monitor?
Well if they want real info it may be a good idea.
Time to say goodbye to facebook.
While we still have them at least.
Of course. And nothing new about this, except that the CIA is evidently doing some outsourcing.
Back in the clinton days, you couldn’t send a private email mentioning Mena Airport or the boys on the railroad tracks or Arkansas prison tainted blood or Whitewater without having it register with the feds.
The question is, what to do when millions of people are using such suspicious key words, other than keep a very large list of possible troublemakers.
Well, Stalin and Hitler and Mao knew what to do when there were tens of millions of potential troublemakers. We haven’t reached that stage yet, although Obama is more openly approaching it than even clinton, who put his former Arkansas state trooper sex procurer in charge of FEMA.
Obama has so many people working for him who go well beyond that state trooper that you can’t keep track of them.
Meantime, I presume we’re all on the lists.
My life has been an open book to the US security agencies due clearances I have held over the decades..........they know what I thought about this corksoaker Obama before he was elected POTUS..........
It troubles me, but playing Devils Advocate, how would the public react if a terrorist made threatening Facebook and YouTube postings before a mass casualty attack, and the intel community had failed to catch-on?
Back in the clinton days, you couldn’t send a private email mentioning Mena Airport or the boys on the railroad tracks or Arkansas prison tainted blood or Whitewater without having it register with the feds.
Wow, I guess then 1/7 of our intel community must have been hunkered down under deep cover in Whitewater, Wisconsin (population 13,437....SAA.....LOOT!)
I wonder if FreeRepublic.com is one of the sites they monitor?
See Google all data for sale.
I’ll bet it is :D because it is a sort of meta-news site, even not completely, a site with collection of posted news from various sources around the world. When I started to visit Free Republic, I never thought I would get this rich on news source and opinions.
FYI. :-)
From the article: (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.)
How long that ‘moment’ is we don’t know.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.