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 over a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Amazon. (Closed social networks, like Facebook, aren’t touched, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
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