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So what do you think, Norman?

Listening, Learning, Engaging, Integrating and Leveraging, this sounds like a media strategy for a multinational corporation, well it kind of is.

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. 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. via wired

While this is not the only tool the spy agencies use to monitor internet communication it’s got to make one wonder why monitor open communication channels? The high level terrorists live in and give orders out of Yemen and Pakistan, far away from the internet and phone lines. However sophisticated intelligence becomes to monitor these people, they combat this by not using technology at all and unplugging themselves off the grid. The spy agencies know this, so why invest in more technology?
If you are interested in learning more about the high tech eavesdropping cwatch the brilliant PBS documentary The Spy Factory

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Comments

 

Mark Rogers

November 1, 2009 at 12:30 am

This is a total waste of government spending. If any government entity should have the power to monitor social media it should be the FBI looking for sexual predators, that’s it. However, I think our local police departments do a pretty fine job at this already. The CIA needs to get their *** on the ground where their needed instead of trying to play super-spy in their back yard. Of course, Obama said he prefers them doing nothing at all, so what’s a high tech spy agency to do when the boredom sets in? Anyway, everybody should always know that every act performed falls under Internet marketing to some extent, no matter what your doing.

 

Mark Rogers

November 1, 2009 at 12:36 am

This work is supposed to be for the FBI at most, looking for sexual predators. However, I think local law enforcement is doing fine – so this is really just an example of what happens when super-spies are neutered by their president and have nothing else to do but check out their social media pages. A reminder to all, everything you do online markets something on the Internet somehow… Who are you conducting your Internet Marketing to? Next thing you know we’ll have CIA agents meeting “hot singles” with big bags of “male enhancement” in their long lonelt nights of not interrogating terrorists.

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    Vlad Nedelcu is completely Open Source, his origin and purpose still a total mystery, he almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left him before they met. I live my life by the application of the hacker ethic and net collectivism.

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