U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

[wired.com] 
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.’”

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