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

Fri Oct 23 16:44:12 EDT 2009

Yahuda and all,

  From strictly a intelegance gathering point of view this
is a very adept move by the Obama administration.  From a
social networking point of view it has perhaps many known
and unknown consequences of which the unknown we will
all learn of much later, or perhaps in the not too distant
future.  What's a bit galling is that this move was not
open and transparent to the US public, but will not go
unnoticed by other nations intelegance agencies or certainly
miscreants of various sorts.

  This said your earlier post regarding Google's concerns
about Internet regulation and it's effects on Google as
well as potential future customers/suckers that may consider
Google services of various sorts as well as users for use of
their search engine.  More interesting and nearly halarious
to me is that for several years I have along with some of our
members have been trying to warn Google of their business
practices as they have become the "Poster Child" for driving
Internet regulation by those very abusive and privacy intruding
business practices.  Now it appears that they shall reap the
whirlwind for such foolish abusive practices especially given
their Gmail and search engine products that have been the
main culprits for such a drive and the fact that Google had
been providing huge amounts of users and subscribers PII data
to Intelegance organizations such as the CIA.  

-----Original Message-----
>From: Yehuda Katz <yehudakatz at mailinator.com>
>Sent: Oct 23, 2009 1:02 PM
>To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
>Subject: [governance] CIA's Latest Web 2.0 Move Raises Questions
>
>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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Regards,

Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 294k members/stakeholders strong!)
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