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| CIA’s daily menu: 5 mln foreign tweets! |
It has been
a while since the US Central Intelligence Agency admitted it keeps an eye on
everything that appears on Facebook and Twitter. A new report now says the CIA
“vengeful librarians” have to follow up to 5,000,000 foreign tweets a day.
In
November, the CIA acknowledged a full monitoring of social networks. Almost
two-thirds of intelligence reports made by the CIA for Washington now come from
analysts monitoring millions of individual messages sent worldwide, says the
Associated Press.
The CIA’s
“vengeful librarians,” as the CIA Open Source Center (OSC) director Doug Naquin
named them, monitor everything available regardless of its significance and
language. This also includes TV news channels, internet chat rooms, local radio
stations, and newspapers. Social media became the focus of the group’s
activities during the unrest in the Islamic Republic of Iran, following its
2009 presidential election.
The goal is
to map “the mood of a region” where the US pursues interest. Such a process let
Washington in on the global public reaction after the death of Al-Qaeda leader
Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan back in May.
Before
that, the analysts saw the popular uprising coming to Egypt, but could not
predict its exact timelines, said the center’s director, Doug Naquin.
Fast-paced
riots, as the ones which took place during the Arab Spring, put social networks
such as Facebook and Twitter on to the top among crucial intelligence tools.
The two also offer a growing coverage, with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook network
boasting over 800 million active users, while June statistics showed over 300
million were singed in the Twitter microblog.
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