Will the CIA Be Able to Separate the Truth from Carefully Crafted Crazy Blogs?
April 27, 2006 — Don't look now, but the Central Intelligence Agency is reading the nation's diaries …
You may have missed the recent story — these days the mainstream media seems more arbitrary than ever about what news it deems important — but it seems that the CIA has begun data mining the blogosphere in search of new trends, intelligence and early indicators of emerging international problems.
The story, as reported in The Washington Times by Bill Gertz, notes that the CIA's newly created Open Source Center — even the name shows that the Company is getting pretty computer hip — has "recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content," according to the Washington Times story.
The story goes on to say that the amount of the resulting "unclassified intelligence" reaching President Bush and other senior policy makers has dramatically increased in recent months. Though the center won't go into detail, it will say that the amount of blog-based reporting has gone up in the president's daily briefing.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/story?id=750595&page=1