Aggregated Awareness

From Wired comes this interesting article about the investment arm of the CIA - In-Q-Tel; making an investment into social media monitoring software maker Visible Technologies.

In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe says that they have "an interested end customer" in the intelligence community for Visible. One can join the dots in guessing who that 'end customer' will be.

Excerpt: "...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."

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