Yesterday, Wired reported that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, had made an investment into Visible Technologies, a Seattle-based social media monitoring company. According to the Wired article, In-Q-Tel’s investment is part of “a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ‘open source intelligence’ — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.”
After Wired broke this story, many news sources reported on it with a certain air of alarmism – “The CIA is going to spy on you!” – but, come on, it’s the CIA. Do you really think they haven’t already been snooping into social media sites? What is significant about the CIA’s investment into Visible Technologies isn’t that the CIA is monitoring foreign social media, but rather that social media technology has expanded so quickly in recent years that it touches on every aspect of our society, including national defense.
While there are certainly many legal and ethical issues involved in the CIA monitoring social media, namely the fear that American citizens will be monitored (something that is not supposed to occur within the CIA’s jurisdiction), the important thing for web users to consider is the fact that what you place online is never private. To ensure that what you say online doesn’t come back to hurt you in the future (or accidentally make you look like a terrorist-supporter) , you should always use caution in what you post to social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
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