US intelligence agency, the CIA, has formed a "strategic partnership and technology development agreement" with Visible Technologies, a company specialising in data-mining social-networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, has invested in Visible Technologies, "a leading provider of social media analysis and engagement solutions". The move is believed to be part of the CIA’s aim to utilise the "open source" information available on social networking sites. In-Q-tel was set up in 1999 to identify "innovative technology solutions to support the mission of the CIA and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community". Visible listens in to around half a million sites a day covering forums and blogs. It also crawls commercial sites with forums such as Amazon. The only sites it cannot reach are closed networks such as Facebook. Customers of Visible receive real-time feeds on a required subject, based on a series of keywords. These are scored as neutral, positive or negative depending on the message and the influence of the writer. Visible Technologies currently works with clients including Microsoft, Hormel and Xerox.
http://www.ejc.net/media_news/cia_invests_in_social_media_monitoring_company/
