In Case
You Missed It
Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA
By Jim
Edwards
August
27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Jul 11, 2011 - CBS
News - You don't need to wear a tinfoil hat to
believe that the CIA is using
Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG)
and other social media to spy on people. That's
because the
CIA publishes a helpful list of press releases
on all the social media ventures it sponsors,
via its technology investment arm
In-Q-Tel.
The companies that take In-Q-Tel's money aren't
shy about publicizing what they're up to,
either. Most recently,
GeoSemble announced an update
to its GeoXray product,
which monitors social media chatter based on
location:
This
capability benefits business users who may
be monitoring competition, supply chain
activity or business opportunities in a
county, neighborhood or border region.
For
governments at the city, local and Federal
levels it brings the ability to visualize
activity in a given area filtered by topic,
time and location.
... we
can deliver whatever information is
available about that place from websites,
blogs, tweets and other social media
automatically and accurately ...
The world's largest database on
individuals
One of the main
threats to privacy comes from advertisers,
who want to track everything consumers do on the
web and scrape their online accounts for
personal information. It shouldn't be
surprising, therefore, to learn that the
CIA and the worlds largest ad agency network,
WPP
(WPPGY),
have been in bed together on a social media
data-mining venture since at least January 2009.
WPP currently claims to own the
world's largest database of unique individual
profiles --
including demographic, financial, purchase and
geographic histories. WPP's Visible
Technologies unit took an investment
from In-Q-Tel in fall of 2009. Visible
Technologies develops tools that can scan social
media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
WPP also funded Omniture,
a marketing ROI agency, with $25 million in
January 2009. Omniture's Visual Sciences unit
has also taken In-Q-Tel money. The
CIA re-upped with Visible Technologies
as part of another $6 million funding round in
March 2011.
Other
companies that mine web data and have taken
In-Q-Tel investments include:
-
Fetch Technologues:
"Fetch's customized software agents navigate
websites to instantly deliver meaningful,
useful and reliable data, and easily
integrate with a company's existing data
management system for immediate analysis."
-
Cleversafe:
A cloud-based storage company that, as Wired
notes, is "'ideal for storing mission
critical data by addressing the core
principles of data confidentiality,
integrity and availability.' (Incidentally,
those principles also spell out CIA)."
-
Cloudera:
provides data storage software that makes it
easy for governments to process and analyze
vast amounts of information.
|
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
Google and CIA: old friends
Are you seeing a trend yet?
Google (GOOG) has been a
partner with the CIA
since 2004 when the company bought Keyhole, a
mapping technology business that eventually
became Google Earth. In 2010,
Google and In-Q-Tel made a joint investment on a
company called Recorded Future,
which has the
Minority Report-style
goal of creating a "temporal analytics engine"
that scours the web and creates curves that
predict where events may head.
Google is already helping the government write,
and rewrite, history. Here, from its
transparency report,
are some stats on the amount of information it
has either given to the government or wiped from
the web based on requests by U.S. agencies:
-
4,601 requests
from U.S. government agencies for "user
data"
-
Google complied with government requests for
user data 94% of the time.
-
1,421 requests
for "content
removal"
-
Google complied with content removal
requests 87% of the time.
- 15
requests were from "executive, police etc."
- 1
was a national security request.
This
article was first published by
CBS News
- Jul 11, 2011 -
