CIA buys into Web 2.0 monitoring firm

Wired online has a report that the US Central Intelligence Agency has bought a significant stake in a market research firm called Visible Technologies that specializes in monitoring new social media such as blogs, mirco-blogs, forums, customer feedback sites and social networking sites (although not closed sites like Facebook – or at least that’s what they claim).  This is interesting but it isn’t surprising – most of what intelligence agencies has always been sifting through the masses of openly available information out there – what is now called open-source intelligence – but the fact is that people are putting more of themselves out their than ever before, and material that you would never have expected to be of interest to either commercial or state organisations is now there to be mined for useful data.

(thanks, once again to Aaron Martin for this).

Author: David

I'm David Murakami Wood. I'm currently Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. I like reading, cycling, running, and I am slowly coming to the realization of the limits of getting older. View all posts by David