The Spy Who Tweeted Me






screengrabs from the Visible Technologies website

I predict mass harassment and pwnings of @visible_tech on Twitter when word gets out about what they're doing, with funding from the CIA. From Wired :

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.

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.

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.

This claim of there being a difference between domestic and international monitoring of Twitter and blogs is, of course, complete bullshit.

Everything online is international, and is datamined and spied upon regardless of whether the blog post or comment or tweet originates in Syria, Waziristan or Oklahoma.

Here's how Visible Technologies explains the CIA's In-Q-Tel in a media release :

In-Q-Tel concentrates on several broad commercial technology areas, including applications software and analytics; bio, chemical, and nanotechnology; communications and infrastructure; digital identity and security; and embedded systems and power. To date, In-Q-Tel has engaged with more than 150 companies and delivered more than 240 technology solutions to the Intelligence Community.

Steven Aftergood in Wired :

“....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.’”

Problematic, not permissible, but already happening.

You don't think that those in the government and intelligence agencies fearing American insurrection are not already keeping tabs on everyone who follows Fox News' Glenn Beck on Twitter?

Of course they are.

But as I said earlier, it's not men in hats in smokey rooms doing the monitoring today, it's data-crunching software, virtually incriminating people for the thoughts and emotions they dare to express online.

The Full Story From Wired Is Here

Yes, They Are Watching You, But They're Mostly Not Human

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