CIA ADMITS FULL MONITORING OF FACEBOOK AND OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS

<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></span><br /> <span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /> </span></span> <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img src="http://worldtruth.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/700_20f7cd86b97176bbb1dd58792ac4adb3.jpg" /></span><br /> <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /> </span> <br /> <div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ultimately, this can have the effect of causing a net change to the public’s opinions and understanding of key world events.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><img src="http://socioecohistory.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/william_casey_cia_psyop_disinformation.jpg?w=459&h=379" /></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wired.com published an article how US spies are making investments in the Company <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> in order to monitor your blogs and read your tweets.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"That’s kind of the basic step - get in and monitor," says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> 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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><img alt="CIA Admits Full Monitoring of Facebook, Google, Youtube and Other Social Networks (Video)" src="http://thetruthisnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CIA-Admits-Full-Monitoring-of-Facebook-Google-Youtube-and-Other-Social-Networks-Video.jpg" /></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"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.’"</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Visible chief executive officer <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmNydW5jaGJhc2UuY29tL3BlcnNvbi9kYW4tdmV0cmFz" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">Dan Vetras</a> says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> 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.”</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5959300518432319010" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmlxdC5vcmcv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">In-Q-Tel</a> 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 <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vbXlzcGFjZS5jb20v" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">MySpace</a> for spooks. The Office of the <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vd3d3LmRuaS5nb3Yv" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">Director of National Intelligence</a> 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 <a href="http://www.disclose.tv/url/Tm9DaGFuY2VBbm9ueW1vdXNodHRwOi8vbXlzcGFjZS5jb20v" rel="nofollow" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_new">MySpace</a> and blogs.”</span></div> <!-- Begin BidVertiser code --> <script language="JavaScript1.1" src="http://bdv.bidvertiser.com/BidVertiser.dbm?pid=579098%26bid=1449088" type="text/javascript"></script> <noscript><a href="http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/BidVertiser/bdv_advertiser.dbm">marketing</a></noscript> <!-- End BidVertiser code --> <a href="http://ads.cpxcenter.com/cpxcenter/s_click.php?nid=4&pid=49778&sid=51388&cid=10953&adnid=4&cuid=0oicbz9&adtype=7&ad=131917&subid=&opt1=&opt2="><img border="0" height="250" src="http://ads.cpxcenter.com/cpxcenter/cr_image.php?nid=4&pid=49778&sid=51388&cid=10953&adnid=4&cuid=0oicbz9&ad=131917&adtype=7&subid=&opt1=&opt2=" width="300" /></a> <script type='text/javascript' src='http://ads.qadserve.com/t?id=a2b34d3a-e07c-4678-a7a8-346319aafab6&size=728x90'></script> <div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.”</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="266" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5b82o3D0weQ?feature=player_embedded" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="320"></iframe></div><!-- Begin BidVertiser code --> <script language="JavaScript1.1" src="http://bdv.bidvertiser.com/BidVertiser.dbm?pid=579098%26bid=1449088" type="text/javascript"></script> <noscript><a href="http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/BidVertiser/bdv_advertiser.dbm">marketing</a></noscript> <!-- End BidVertiser code --> <a href="http://ads.cpxcenter.com/cpxcenter/s_click.php?nid=4&pid=49778&sid=51388&cid=10953&adnid=4&cuid=0oicbz9&adtype=7&ad=131917&subid=&opt1=&opt2="><img border="0" height="250" src="http://ads.cpxcenter.com/cpxcenter/cr_image.php?nid=4&pid=49778&sid=51388&cid=10953&adnid=4&cuid=0oicbz9&ad=131917&adtype=7&subid=&opt1=&opt2=" width="300" /></a> <script type='text/javascript' src='http://ads.qadserve.com/t?id=a2b34d3a-e07c-4678-a7a8-346319aafab6&size=728x90'></script> <div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 16px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Source:<a href="http://worldtruth.tv/cia-admits-full-monitoring-of-facebook-and-other-social-networks/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://worldtruth.tv/cia-admits-full-monitoring-of-facebook-and-other-social-networks/</a><a href="http://www.disclose.tv/news/CIA_admits_full_monitoring_of_Facebook_and_other_social_networks/90134#ixzz2KNgERn00" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://www.disclose.tv/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.disclose.tv</a></span></div><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> </span>

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 a...

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