[governance] CIA's Latest Web 2.0 Move Raises Questions

[Yehuda Katz]

CIA's Latest Web 2.0 Move Raises Questions
internetevolution.com By Rob Salkowitz
10/23/2009

Art.Ref.:
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=697&doc_id=183570&

In a move sure to get knees jerking all over the Web, the investment arm of the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has taken an ownership share in Visible
Technologies, a private firm that specializes in the monitoring of social
media. 

While it's worth getting steamed that Big Brother is riffling through your
Flickr pics and reading your TripAdvisor posts, the details of this deal raise
a lot more questions beyond the basic "civil liberties vs. national security"
debate. 

In-Q-Tel , a federal entity that invests on behalf of the CIA and the
intelligence community, put an undisclosed amount of cash into Visible, which
crawls more than half a million public social sites per day, from lightly
trafficked blogs up to mega sites like Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube. It
provides real-time analytics and keyword searches for its customers, including
customized influence- and relationship-mapping.

The reasons why the CIA might take an interest in social media conversations
are pretty obvious. Al-Qaeda has a blog. The Taliban launched a YouTube
channel. The Secret Service reports that domestic death threats against the
president are up 400 percent since Obama took office in January. 

The smartest bad guys know how to keep a low profile, but plenty of crazies are
letting their freak flags fly online, and it's not a bad thing that
intelligence agencies are paying attention in a systematic way. Who knows what
clues might be waiting to be mined from people's NetFlix queues and Amazon
reviews?

Reportedly, Visible does not crawl private networks like Facebook. Everything
swept up in this net is public already. While the analytics angle may raise
some eyebrows, keeping track of conversations on public networks is not
fundamentally different from reading foreign newspapers and recording global
media broadcasts, which the CIA has done as part of its basic intelligence
gathering since the 1940s. 

One complicating factor is the rise of Twitter as a tool for dissidents and
political activists -- both overseas (as in Iran last summer) and closer to
home (some of the protests at the G8 Summit in Pittsburgh were coordinated
through Twitter). Tools like Twitter get their power from being public, and CIA
involvement raises the possibility of mischief ranging from provocation and
tampering to the targeting of "trouble makers" to attempts to chill free
speech. 

But that ship has sailed. If anyone thinks the CIA -- and every other
intelligence agency on Earth -- isn't already neck-deep in social media
counterintelligence and disinformation, I have a used tinfoil hat to sell you. 

No, the biggest questions here are on the business side, not the policy side.
Why is the CIA, through In-Q-Tel, taking ownership in a private company rather
than just contracting with the firm as a customer for its services? Given the
emerging technical standards and speed of innovation in the area of analytics,
why place a big bet on one firm rather than spread the risk around by engaging
with multiple firms with multiple methods for slicing and dicing the data? 

Of course, we don't know that In-Q-Tel is not also doing that, but it could be
that there is something unique to Visible -- its approach? Its technology? Its
personnel? Does U.S. intelligence need to bring Visible inside the tent to
integrate its analytics engine with systems whose reach and scope are not so
straightforward?

And if so, why make this public? Generally speaking, when the CIA wants to keep
something like this a secret, it stays secret. A public transaction through a
known CIA investment proxy is just asking for media coverage. And to what end?
The way you catch bad guys dumb enough to discuss their plans on public
networks is to let them think they are being clever and inconspicuous. Big
headlines saying "The CIA buys social analytics firm!" seems like an invitation
for folks to take their conversations underground.

In short, it's tough to fathom how the intelligence establishment could be
savvy enough to recognize they should be keeping tabs on the social Web, but
then leave this many threads dangling.

The play for Visible is certainly neither the CIA's first nor its only foray
into Web 2.0 analytics, but for whatever reason, it has become part of the
public discourse. Yes, the civil liberties angles are troubling, but I have the
feeling it's going to take John Le Carre to get to the bottom of this odd spy
story.

— Rob Salkowitz is the author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the
Technology Age Gap (2008) and co-author of Listening to the Future (2009). His
next book is Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship Are
Transforming the Global Economy.

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