Careful on what you tweet.

THE NEXT WEB November 4, 2011
The CIA is watching: US intelligence teams monitor 5 million tweets EVERY DAY
Jon Russell
ART.CIA_.LOGO_.AFP_.GI_
The CIA is watch­ing over social media, accord­ing to a new arti­cle from the AP which reveals that the US gov­ern­ment pours over 5 mil­lion tweets sent on Twit­ter every day.

Given the rise of social media across the world, news that US intel­li­gence agen­cies are tap­ping into the medi­um to stay informed of con­ver­sa­tions across the world is not unex­pect­ed although their use of the con­tent may sur­prise you.

With more than 800 mil­lion using Face­book and Twit­ter see­ing more than 400 mil­lion tweets sent across its ser­vice, the CIA’s sur­veil­lance team has a lot of noise to short through to gar­ner use­ful infor­ma­tion.

The AP fea­ture explains how the staff at its Open Source Cen­ter, referred to as the “venge­ful librar­i­ans” by its team, sorts through the clut­ter of cyber­space to build intel­li­gence reports that analyse inter­na­tion­al opin­ion and respons­es to US activ­i­ties.

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.

The sys­tem appar­ent­ly enabled the agency to fore­see the Egypt­ian upris­ing although it was unable to pre­dict exact­ly when it would hit, Doug Naquin, the cen­ter’s direc­tor, told AP in what the news wire says is the first ever media visit to the oper­a­tions.

A exam­ple of the work that the cen­tre car­ries out came when the US killed Osama Bin Laden ear­li­er this year, when the CIA turned to social media to build a report that gave the White House a snap­shot of the world’s opin­ion on the inci­dent.

Since tweets can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be pegged to a geo­graph­ic loca­tion, the ana­lysts broke down reac­tion by lan­guages. The result: The major­i­ty of Urdu tweets, the lan­guage of Pak­istan, and Chi­nese tweets, were neg­a­tive. China is a close ally of Pak­istan’s. Pak­istani offi­cials protest­ed the raid as an affront to their nation’s sov­er­eign­ty, a sore point that con­tin­ues to com­pli­cate U.S.-Pak­istani rela­tions.

When the pres­i­dent gave his speech address­ing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in neg­a­tive from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Alge­ria, the Per­sian Gulf and Israel, too, with speak­ers of Ara­bic and Tur­kic tweets charg­ing that Obama favored Israel, and Hebrew tweets denounc­ing the speech as pro-Arab.

So the next time you care to pass com­ment on US for­eign pol­i­cy, Pres­i­dent Obama or the tasty sand­which you just ate, the CIA and Pres­i­dent Obama might be lis­ten­ing.