CIA Buys Stake in a Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets, Clicks

Not exactly the shocker of the century, but one to take note of nonetheless; the CIA is now investing in Visible Technologies, a software firm that monitors and steers social media, to more closely monitor the clicks, requests, tweets, pokes, stumbles, digs, feeds and any other dumb-downed cutesy-titled web exercises one may engage in.

We have been monitored by the government for argueably all our lives, others more closely than some. And when suspicious web activity has surged, they have proven to at least in the game, though not necessarily a step ahead.

However, now Wired Magazine is breaking the story about what the CIA wants now : " America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon."

The magazine goes on: "In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies... 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 scours almost a million 2.0 websites every day, nitpicking posts, conversations, blogs, Flickr, Youtube, and the like, to dish out a rundown of what is being said on these sites. People subscribed to Visible are provided with a plate of real-time feeds of everything searched and said, based on a series of keywords.

The CIA states it wants Visible to track foreign social media, and issue spooks, which is “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally."

The problem with all this of course is the paramount difference between saying and doing.

We all post, send and comment with little second thought. We also have heard that the internet is public territory, and have correspondingly experienced at least one bout of unfair or unmerited attention based on our web-action or an action documented and exhibited over the web.

So, although anything we put out there is technically fair game, it could quickly become controversial if they utilized information gathered through Visible to conduct unauthorized investigations. Still may not hit close to home-but think if they used found information on visited sites or commented photos done by political candidates or journalists, lawyers, doctors or professors.

The potential for information and character exploitation through this avenue, although said information has been conducted on open, public forums and gathered through a legal and accepted platform, is monumental.