CorpComms Magazine

America's Central Intelligence Agency is acquiring a stake in Visible Technologies, a software firm that specialises in monitoring social media, as part of an initiative to exploit 'open source intelligence'.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, is making the purchase, according to Wired. Visible crawls more than 500,000 websites every day, scraping more than one million posts and conversations online. This includes postings on Amazon, Flickr and YouTube. However, Visible currently does not search closed social networks, such as Facebook.

Each post is scored as either positive, negative, mixed or neutral, and offers an indication of how influential each author is. Donald Tighe, spokesman for the CIA, said that In-Q-Tel wants to use Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give intelligence staff 'early warning of how issues are playing internationally'.

In-Q-Tel was founded by the US government in 1999 to identify and work with companies developing cutting edge technologies.

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet