The Central Intelligence Agency’s “Open Source Center” follows millions of tweets per day, plusFacebook, MySpace, newspapers, journals, TV news channels, radio stations worldwide, Internet chatrooms and blog sites. The CIA does this to gauge the mood of societies, as well gather intelligence on a variety of subjects. The analysts who monitor the information are called “vengeful librarians.”
They operate in monitoring social networks around the world in search of direct and indirect threats to national security. Relationships are also checked to probe local opinion, conduct surveillance and capture useful intelligence information…
The center began to focus on social media after seeing the reaction of Twitter users against the Iranian regime after the disputed election results of 2009 in that country with Mahmoud AhmadinejadMahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection”, according to Pravda.ru Russia’s leading newspaper publication.
Nationally the CIA has been monitoring facebook users but facebook building projects as well including the new $450 million dollar data center outside Charlotte, N.C. (seehttp://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372572,00.asp#fbid=d-x06zlBMPE).
One insider suggested the CIA is “very interested in all phases of the construction process of this new facility in Rutherford County, N.C.”
“This may make it easier to monitor the millions of facebook users…,” says Erin Woods a CIA watchman who has been monitoring the intelligence agency’s surveillance programs, including the Open Source Center (OSC) for years now.
Unconfirmed reports suggest the CIA has already secured the building and construction plans for the new facility.
In addition, the CIA OSC is interested in facebook’s new state of the art data center located in Prineville, Oregon.
This is just one of the many projects of the “vengeful librarians”.
TOP PRIORITY FOR CIA
The Aspin-Brown Commission stated in 1996, that US access to open sources was “severely deficient” and that this should be a “top priority” for both funding and DCI attention.
In issuing its July 2004 report, the 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of an open-source intelligence agency, but without further detail or comment. Subsequently, the WMD Commission (also known as the Robb-Silberman Commission) report in March 2005 recommended the creation of an Open Source Directorate at the CIA.
Following these recommendations, in November 2005 the Director of National Intelligence announced the creation of the DNI Open Source Center.
In addition to collecting openly available information, it trains analysts to make better use of this type of information resource.
The Center absorbed the CIA’s previously existing Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), originally established in 1941, with FBIS head Douglas Naquin named as director of the Center.
Another episode was the group, which acted in the death of Bin Laden. After his death in Pakistan in May, the CIA went on Twitter to guide the White House on global public opinion. President Barack ObamaBarack Obama receives reports almost daily from the group. With that, he was told that most of the tweets in Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese, were negative to the U.S. at that time. Pakistani officials protested the attack as an affront to the sovereignty of the country.
Sites like Facebook and Twitter have also become a key resource for following a crisis such as the riots that raged in Bangkok (Thailand) in April and May last year. As well the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread across America. The CIA is rumored to be collecting the names of people associated with the movement and attempting to identify leaders within the Occupy movement. In this regard, the CIA (along with local law enforcement agencies) has accumulated the names of hundreds of thousands of individual protesters, sympathizers and supporters. Collectively these people are labeled “subversives” by the CIA.
This is to not only track and monitor the protesters and their activities but also prevent them from attaining sensitive jobs and security clearances in some cases.
Today the Open Source Center has emerged as a key agency within CIA.