CIA admits Full Monitoring of Facebook and other Social Networks
Most people use social media like
Facebook and Twitter to share photos of friends and family, chat with
friends and strangers about random and amusing diversions, or follow
their favorite websites, bands and television shows.
But what does the US military use those
same networks for? Well, we can't tell you: That's "classified," a
CENTCOM spokesman recently informed Raw Story.
One use that's confirmed, however, is the
manipulation of social media through the use of fake online "personas"
managed by the military. Recently the US Air Force had solicited private
sector vendors for something called "persona management software." Such
a technology would allow single individuals to command virtual armies
of fake, digital "people" across numerous social media portals.
These "personas" were to have detailed,
fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers,
and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up,
preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the
account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so
these "personas" could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world,
providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the
operator was not really present.
When Raw Story first reported on the
contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted
with it or even if it had been acquired. The potential for misuse,
however, was abundantly clear.
A fake virtual army of people could be
used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online
comment threads, or manipulate social media to the point where valuable
stories are suppressed.
Ultimately, this can have the effect of causing a net change to the public's opinions and understanding of key world events.
Wired.com published an article how US spies are making investments in the Company In-Q-Tel in order to monitor your blogs and read your tweets.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA
and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible
Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social
media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get
better at using "open source intelligence" - information that's publicly
available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper
articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every
day.
Visible crawls over half a million web
2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations
taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and
Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the
moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said
on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
"That's kind of the basic step - get in and monitor," says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
Then Visible "scores" each post, labeling
it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how
influential a conversation or an author is. ("Trying to determine who
really matters," as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a
chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to
response through a web interface.
In-Q-Tel says
it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks
"early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,"
spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Of course, such a tool can also be
pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps
tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the
company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker
Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns
against the company.
"Anything that is out in the open is fair
game for collection," says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence
issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But "even if
information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still
be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations
or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to
use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political
figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information
for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the
information in question is technically 'open source.'"
Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an "end customer," thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment.
And more government clients are now on the horizon. "We just got
awarded another one in the last few days," Vetras adds.
Tighe disputes this - sort of. "This
contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency
of government and this company," he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does
have "an interested end customer" in the intelligence community for
Visibile. And if all goes well, the company's software will be used in
pilot programs at that agency. "In pilots, we use real data. And during
the adoption phase, we use it real missions."
Neither party would disclose the size of
In-Q-Tel's investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected
revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the
deal says the In-Q-Tel cash
will be used to boost Visible's foreign languages capabilities, which
already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.
Visible has been trying for nearly a year
to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up
with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies,
which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S.
Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its
website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting "social media
engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and a high
proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is
also looking for an "information system security engineer" who already
has a "Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA
Full Scope Polygraph" security clearance.
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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