CIA Admits It Monitors, Analyzes Facebook, Twitter

As always support social networks are now the ideal carrier for an abnormal amount of information and this is the main reason why many governments have invested and are investing in sophisticated analysis tools that can implement intelligent search within an ocean seemingly unrelated data.

An unit part of the CIA’s Open Source Center is responsible for monitoring the vast and various social networks, local and international news, radio, and television, Internet chat rooms, and pretty much anything from which they can procure intelligence.

Their goal is to monitor every facet of the internet in every imaginable language, cross-referencing that information with local news reports and information gleaned in the more traditional, cloak-and-dagger, spy-type espionage. Much of the information,according to the AP, ends up in the hands of White House officials and even in President Obama’s daily intelligence briefings.

One of the main problems that I was placed when we talked about systems analysis is themassive cost of these technologies and the relative maturity.

On the second point I never had doubts, because the available technologies allow similaranalysis without problems, while there was some concern about funding availability.

But when government agencies come into play even this threshold is exceeded in the lightof their budget.

What are the plausible scenarios? Government agencies that monitor the sentimentshared by these powerful channels. We are really interested in preventive actions or do we want to indoctrinate new ideologies?
The dangers are real, we will continue monitoring action but be careful not to go further, the pace is really short.

More details on Threat Post web site

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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