Is that new Twitter friend a spy?


Chances are that your will never know if any of your social media friends is a spy and nor should you. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there, or at least their surrogates according to a post over at Wired’s Danger Room blog.

In fact the CIA through their investment arm In-Q-Tel recently invested in a company called Vision Technology who specializes in monitoring social media. This is all apparently part of a movement within the intelligence community to make better use of what they refer to as open source intelligence, otherwise known as data mining social media and social networks for information that they might otherwise miss.

However rather than expend the manpower themselves to do the heavy grunt work of this data mining they are turning to companies like Vision Technologies to do it for them.

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. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (“Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

I actually think that this is a good idea but the problem is that within US soil there are some serious questions to be asked. As far as I know there is a sharp dividing line in the US regarding the legality of information gathered and who can gather it. If I understand it correctly only the FBI or state agencies are allowed to perform such in-soil data mining activities. Agencies like the CIA and NSA are suppose to be restricted from this area.

So what happens when this kind of data mining is farmed out to companies?

What sort of safeguards are in place to make sure that the data collected isn’t going to the wrong agencies and thereby breaking the law?

It’s a good idea but I really worry about the implementation.

image credit: News Initiative

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