Lucid Imagination | 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 A specialized intelligence website written by experts, since 2008 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

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