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- Wonder if they'll be monitoring who's badmouthing California cabs, chards and merlots next...
Seems the digital world is making it ever easier for government computers to monitor personal behavior, even in the midst of the geometrically growing data deluge.
"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.
"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.... Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
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"Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is.
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" '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'... Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. "
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/
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0390 - Reply by GregT, Oct 25.
I think other organizations and governments have been using that kind of stuff for a long time. The difference is that in the US, there's going to be a lot of litigation to determine exactly what's the difference between "public" and "private" behavior.
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331 - Reply by Eric Guido, Oct 25.
They have to do something to justify their budget. The intelligence community must have a hard time these days now that they're supposed to be a "kind and gentler" part of the American government. I guess if they can't water-board their suspects for info then they'll just get it from the internet. Hard to imagine how this works though.
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1140
- Reply by dmcker, Oct 25.
It's easy to imagine marketers, PR firms and political consultancies using this type of service for themselves and their clients, Not sure how long the technology's been available, though, so doubt that 'a long time' may be the case.
Certainly there has long been a focus on traditional 'opinion makers', and how to influence, co-opt, counter or supplant them. The game has now changed a bit since intelligence (not the spy kind, but the cultural and social kind) is more distributed throughout a wider network of bloggers and readers-yet-also-forum-posters and the like...
