Will the CIA Snoop on Social Networks?

[sabra]

Source: PC World

The government agency is looking for ways to aggregate content from social networks, a report says.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has bought a stake in a company that monitors social media as part of an ongoing clandestine effort by the agency to aggregate content from public sources, Wired is reporting.

The CIA has invested in Visible Technologies, a company that produces technology for search engine marketing for social media. The CIA's interest in its technology is obvious-the agency needs to keep pace with the latest communications technology.

Over 70 percent of Facebook's users are located outside of the United States, in over 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," Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Wired.

The advent of cloud computing raises more concern, because services store data among data centers all around the world. I recently wrote a detailed report about how laws that safeguard your privacy are not the same in every country. If messages pass through a server overseas, does that give the CIA the right to browse the content even if a user is a U.S. citizen?

Read more: http://www.pcworld.com/article/173964/will_the_cia_snoop_on_social_networks.html

[Warpy]

1. Of course they will, are, and have

They'd be negligent if they didn't. The problem is mining the few nuggets of gold out of a mountain of gravel.

I always assume anything I put online will be read by other than the intended recipients.

My mother always told me never to put anything on paper or in a photograph that I couldn't bear having on the front page of a newspaper. It was great advice.

[JDPriestly]

3. I think it is probably a waste time and money.

I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, but most of my family is. Do I really want to know when the nephew of my nephew says, "Dada"? Do I want to read everyone's philosophy? Do I really want to read "news" like this?

[dipsydoodle]

2. Does that mean

they'll be my neighbour on Farmville ? :shrug:

[BadgerKid]

4. Not off-topic, but compare to health records.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=6815317

The take-home message is that once the information is "out there", there are no absolute guarantees who can or cannot see the information.

[damntexdem]

5. Oh, they won't change what they do.

They've just eliminated the middleman.