News you may have missed #0004
June 18, 2009 Leave a comment
- CIA invests in advanced search engine software. Agency’s In-Q-Tel investment arm is now funding Lucid Imagination, a new software start-up.
- US Congress says NSA email surveillance program far wider than first thought. Critics in Congress say the scope of NSA’s recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans is much broader than previously acknowledged.
- Ukraine to expel all Russian intelligence agents from Sevastopol. Ukraine’s National Security Agency says 19 Russian FSB agents stationed in Sevastopol must leave the country by December 13. Ukraine says in intends to evict the Russian naval forces from their base in Crimea when the current lease runs out in 2017.
intelNews.org 
US spy agencies invest in Internet-monitoring company
October 21, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment
In-Q-Tel logo
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital investment arm, is funding a private software company specializing in monitoring online social media, such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. The company, Visible Technologies, unleashes web crawlers that scan and sift through over half a million Internet sites a day, looking for open-source intelligence (OSINT) of interest to its customers. The latter receive real-time updates of Internet activity, based on specific sets of keywords they provide. Noah Shachtman, of Wired’s Danger Room blog, correctly notes that In-Q-Tel’s latest investment is indicative of a wider trend within US intelligence agencies to enhance their foreign OSINT collection and analysis. Incidentally, the US Pentagon has shown similar interests since 2006. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, Donald Tighe, In-Q-Tel, intelligence analysis, Lucid Imagination, News, open source intelligence, OSINT, social networking, surveillance, United States, US DoD, Visible Technologies