Sunday, November 1, 2009

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Which is our greater threat, domestic or foreign? If we don't use our rights we lose them. Take this quiz and find out how much you know about your rights. http://www.american-synergy.com/survey/

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. ~ Thomas Jefferson
clipped from www.wired.com

cia_floor_sealAmerica’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

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.

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.

Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is.
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
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