[Infowarrior] - In-q-Tel Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

[Richard Forno]

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets
	• By Noah Shachtman
	• October 19, 2009  |

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/

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.

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.

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.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic  
bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for  
Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the  
buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is  
tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says  
Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of  
American Scientists. But “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.’”




Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end  
customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government  
clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in  
the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this  
investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this  
company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an  
interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile.  
And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot  
programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the  
adoption phase, we use it real missions.”

Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in  
Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20  
million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel  
cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities,  
which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.

Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government  
field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC,  
consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media  
monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the  
Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts &  
Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with  
Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi,  
French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an  
“information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret  
SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope  
Polygraph” security clearance.

The intelligence community has been interested in social media for  
years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which  
recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies  
have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace  
for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence  
maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available  
information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s  
Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October  
2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and  
honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they  
call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones  
and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena  
like MySpace and blogs.”

But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to  
keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC  
[intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the  
incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need  
help in following young international internet user-herds as they move  
their allegiance from one site to another,” Lewis Shepherd, the former  
senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in  
an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are  
outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200  
non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites  
today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time  
information, we’d call them incompetent.”