The little conspiracy theorist in the back of my head expresses concern…
Last week, Wired reported that the CIA’s spin-off tech branch bought a stake in Visible Technologies. Visible Technologies helps clients “listen to their customers” by parsing public social media data and packaging it in more useful forms for effective monetizing. Visible Technologies doesn’t bug me at all… parse my public social media data all you want. (Monster Cat is not a spy.) What actually surprises me out is that I didn’t know that the CIA had an investment branch (spin-off really, they’re independent), called IN-Q-TEL, that makes strategic investments in and partners with emerging technologies that could prove useful to the CIA and intelligence community. Both cool and creepy. The variety in their portfolio is quite interesting and they are apparently a non-profit to boot.
IQT’s aims, as published publicly, are quite useful, logical and probably provide significant value both to the companies they partner with and the intelligence community as a whole. There are numerous other firms that perform similar roles in other markets. Strategic consulting firms often tout their abilities to help new companies get their foot in the door within a given market. The market in question here just happens to be government agencies often known for their equal-opportunity domestic and international espionage. But anyone who wants to crawl through the dreck … er… content of social networks is welcome to check out my tweets about coffee, cats and catastrophes. That’s why I post it. I wonder what the intelligence community really expects to glean from Twitter. Will they infer that because Stevie834 (not a real user) is getting a second cup of coffee on a Sunday that he was up too late with his cult plotting to take over the government? Or perhaps he just had to get up too early to man the bake sale to fund buying a compound in Montana. Or perhaps the CIA would like to track how many people actually care that GeoCities is being shut down today.
Of course, maybe there are domestic and international terrorist organizations stupid enough to use Twitter and other publicly accessible sites as communications hubs.
tags: cia, in-q-tel, public data, technology, visible technologies
