CIA following Twitter, Facebook

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.





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Great. All the spooks at Langley are now gonna get all fat and lazy. They no longer have to chase down foreign spies, just wait for them to update their facebook, then nab them.

Maybe they can "unfriend" them, apparently that's a huge blow in the facebook world.

This just means that all those spy movies that Hollywood loves to make are going to get really boring.

Don't kid yourself. I've no doubt the occasional CSIS type looks in on CC as well. Why not make use of all available sources of the public mindset?

Hey I just tweeted DEATH TO AMERICA. Hang on there's someone at the door..

They've been following DarkBeaver on here for years.

CSIS is too lazy to get off their fat butts. A former agent I knew said they couldn't find their asses with both hands. They used to download our old web site every other day. We were pretty subversive back then. When the guy I was working with got all freaked out cause they were downloading the site, I laughed. I said, I guess we are doing a good job of pissing off someone in government but I doubted they would come all the way out to the Slocan Valley just to pick us up and I was right.