SPY EYES

According to a feature article on the Associated Press, The CIA’s Open Source Center reviews and analyzes information widely available to the general public, including Twitter and Facebook, and keeps eyes on everything from blogs to tweets to more traditional media.

Along with the vast resources of the agency, the real-time information from an angry blog post to a tweet sent from a BlackBerry, location-based data is gathered and tied to a made phone call to collect as much information as possible. This gives those in the highest offices of the U.S. government a specific picture of a certain place, at a certain time, to predict when an event that may cause national instability, diplomatic harm or suchlike could occur.

The report goes on to suggest that the White House, courtesy of the intelligence gathered from the vast array of resources at their disposal, from the publicly-available content provided by citizens and journalists alike, “saw the uprising in Egypt coming”, but they did not know exactly when it would strike.

When President Barack Obama gave a speech addressing Middle Eastern issues a few weeks later, the center monitored negative Arabic and Turkic tweets denouncing the president as too pro-Israel, and Hebrew tweets criticizing the president for being too pro-Arab.

The center’s of analysis ends up in Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in some form almost every day, reports the AP.

The CIA started reviewing social media after watching Twitter’s influence during the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, when thousands protested the contested results of an election that kept Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office.