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.No fucking shit, people. If you post on a public network (such as having a public blog, like this one), anyone can read it, including the CIA, FBI, MI6, FSB, Mossad, etc., etc.
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.
Here's a tip: If you don't want your writings read, don't post them on the motherfuckering Internet!
2 comments:
I always figured that anyone could read what I post or comment on. I just didn't see a lot of reason to have someone search at high speed looking for what? I hope they are looking for idiots who want to harm people, places and things. I have mixed feelings about looking for these folks.
1.They have a right to speak.
2.They don't have a right to take life, conspire to the same or to incite violence.
So for me there probably are some things that need to be looked for. I'm more worried about the controls or more importantly the lack of controls.
But I guess I ask the following:
What would the difference be in having rooms upon rooms of people searching and reading the internet or fewer people using software that was able to target for specific word phrases? Would you be ok with more people or more software? Or neither?
This is one of those modern dilemmas that should be open for discussion, not just blindly done by the government. We all know technology allows us to do things we could never effectively do otherwise, like organize to do harm, as well as maybe having an easier time finding the idiots.
Google already does the same thing; you can put in a string of words and see every blog that used it. Even if the CIA is paying a shitload of money for it, somebody still needs to come up with the search parameters and evaluate the results.
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