U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Je kunt internet niet meer bijhouden?
Wees gerust, je bent niet alleen ;)

De CIA & Co. hebben hier ook last van, en huren dus steeds meer
buitenstaanders in.

Zou het mogelijk zijn, net zoals bij Google gebeurd, te kunnen zien waarop
gezocht wordt? Misschien zelfs wel grafisch?

Groet / Cees

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

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.

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.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says
Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of
American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by
intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for
unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies
or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to
compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others,
and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not
permissible even if all of the information in question is technically
‘open source.’”

truvoice-dashboard_overview1

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end
customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients
are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few
days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment
has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he
says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end
customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes
well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that
agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we
use it real missions.”

Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible,
a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010.
But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to
boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include
Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.

trupulse2Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the
government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington,
DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media
monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies
is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense
Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French,
Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system
security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [Sensitive
Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security
clearance.

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.”

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