Noah Shachtman, in a Wired exclusive, “U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” discusses the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, investing in a company named Visible Technologies that monitors the social web. He also reports that the CIA is using Visible’s service. Here’s the news release from Visible.
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,
It’s important to know what the CIA is up to and this article does a good job providing that info.
The rest of the article (worth reading) offers more about what Visible does; comments from Steven Aftergood, editor of Secrecy News; and more about the investment and In-Q-Tel in general.
Source: Wired
Can you name another company that received funding from In-Q-Tel? That’s right, Keyhole Corp. And of course we all know that Keyhole was acquired by Google in 2004 and became Google Earth and used with other Google Map services.
+ In-Q-Tel Invests in Keyhole (June 25, 2003)
+ Google Acquires Keyhole (October 27, 2004)
+ In-Q-Tel Sells 5,636 Shares of Google (November 14, 2005)
The acquisition was reported in many places including the Washington Post, The Register, and InternetNews.com.
Here’s the Keyhole Inc. home page a couple of weeks before the Google acquisition. (via Internet Archive)
Could Visible Technologies and what they offer be ripe for a Google purchase? We know Google is in acquisition mode. Something to think about.
This entry was posted
on Monday, October 19th, 2009 and is filed under Access to Information, Open Source Intelligence, Social Media, Technology and Internet.
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