Could your blogs and tweets eventually be monitored by the CIA? An interesting article by "Wired" magazine's Noah Shactman, U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets, reports that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has bought a stake in Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. Visible's technology crawls through millions of web sites, picking up posts and conversations from blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube and Amazon, Shactman's article states. Currently, it doesn't touch closed sites such as Facebook.
In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Shactman that intelligence agencies want Visible to keep track of foreign social media and give intelligence analysts early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally. But as the article points out, the tool can be used inward to monitor domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T, Microsoft and Verizon. For instance, the company is monitoring animal-rights activists' sites for Spam-maker Hormel.
The article is a must-read along with Shactman's interview on DemocracyNow conducted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Oct. 22. As a Facebook and Twitter user some of the issues raised in that interview cause concern. Shactman noted that Microsoft and Google recently signed deals with Twitter and Facebook where all of our tweets and blog updates will be easily searchable via Microsoft's Bing search engine and Google. I wonder if my wall posts that can now only be viewed by my friends will now be exposed to the whole world? Or will the privacy of password-protected tweets and closed Facebook walls still be safeguarded?
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