By: Sputnik
Source: Sputnik
Every time you post a message on Facebook or share a photo on Instagram, remember this: Big Brother is watching you. No, it’s not a quotation from the famous “1984” by George Orwell. The truth of the matter is that the US Central Intelligence Agency has set its eye on social media platforms.
In his latest article US investigative journalist Lee Fang sheds some light of the CIA’s investment programs, referring to a new document obtained by The Intercept.
It turns out that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, is pouring money into companies and start-ups specializing in social media mining and surveillance.
“The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media,” Fang stresses.
For instance, “Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments,” Fang narrates.
The company’s website message reads:
“Hundreds of customer experience, education, public sector and security teams rely on the Geofeedia platform to listen to and engage with social media content from locations across countries, cities, buildings and everything in between from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, VK, Sina Weibo and other social channels.”
The investigative journalist cites Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, who wrote in his 2012 report that keeping an eye on social media is increasingly essential for government agencies.
“Governments are increasingly finding that monitoring social media is an essential component in keeping track of erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends,” the report states.
In his March Op-Ed for Russia Today Neil Clark, a journalist, writer and broadcaster, called attention to the fact that Google experts had a role in managing the Syrian “regime change” project back in 2011-2012. He quoted a series of emails by then president of ‘Google Ideas’ (now called ‘Jigsaw’) Jared Cohen to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, recently exposed by WikiLeaks.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Cohen wrote on July 25, 2012.