CIA turns to open-source intel

Web 2.0 means that there’s a plethora of user-generated information out there to monitor – blog posts, tweets, commentary on news pieces, videos, reviews of books, etc. But the CIA’s not interested in any of that harmless chatter, right?

Wrong. The investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community, In-Q-Tel – which serves the CIA amongst other spy agencies – is putting some financial support into a software company that’s in the business of tracking social media.

The company – Visible Technologies – currently crawls 500,000 websites with user-generated content every day, gathering, organizing and dispersing info-feeds to its clients based on the keywords they have selected. Visible also rates the various posts as positive, negative, mixed or neutral and gives customers an indication as to how important/influential the information is. This allows clients to hone in on the important data without having to sift through pages and pages of conversation threads and commentary.

Thus far, Visible is gathering information from open networks only, so-called ‘open-source intelligence.’ Sites like Facebook are still off limits, but there’s plenty else by which to measure public sentiment, and In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe says Visible’s technology will be especially valuable in providing the U.S. intelligence community with “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally.”

Visible already has a slew of domestic corporate clients, including Microsoft, Dell, AT&T and Verizon. These clients want to keep abreast of what American consumers and in some cases, rights activists, have to say about them, their services and their new products.

Of course, spy agencies have just as much right to gather this readily available social media intelligence as anyone else does…it’s just a question of what rights they will be infringing upon once they put the intel to use. What domestic investigations and potentially unauthorized surveillance will the knowledge gleaned from Web 2.0 lead to…?