The CIA is making moves to become
more computer savvy. Or at least that’s what been gathered by a report from The Intercept, a well-known news station.
The CIA’s venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, In-Q-Tel, is pursuing
contracts with four different companies who specialize in social media
collection and observation. Given the prodigious affluence ISIS has gained
through using Twitter and Facebook as mediums of recruitment and communication,
the CIA justifiably believes this is the next front to combat them.
The four firms revealed in
dealing with In-Q-Tel are Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant. Each of
these demonstrates a unique ability to survey a particular area and register
whether comments are negative, positive, or neutral in nature. A particularly
delightful feature of TransVoyant is that it monitors the web for decision-makers.
Translation: if someone important being tracked tweets something threatening
and if a wave of his/her followers tweet something similar, the software alerts
the user. This is supposed to track gang activity and threats all through the
web. Not to be outdone, Geofeedia released a feature that searches for
dangerous objects, like a knife or RPG, in pictures and videos.
Now these software capabilities are
not new, and both law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been sifting
through different social media collection software over the last few years trying
to find the perfect fit.
But will the CIA’s war on the web
be successful with these additions? ISIS proved its elusiveness and
technological acumen even when Anonymous attempted to take down all its Twitter
and Facebook accounts. They even released a newsletter designed for wannabe
jihadists hackers in Kybernetiq.
Surprisingly, they have withstood the cyber-attacks attempted on all sides, and
the major downside of many of these software products is that the user’s
settings have to be on public to even obtain the information.
Even so, privacy advocates find
issue with these programs. They believe that monitoring for particular general aspects
may place innocent people within those “terror caches” and inevitably make their
lives more difficult. For examples, someone who protests against American
foreign involvement, but does so peacefully, could easily wind up in a search
for militant sovereign citizens.
While this is the right move by
the CIA, the major limitations are the privacy and encryption settings within
these apps. Following the Apple vs. FBI standoff, companies are assuredly
attempting to bolster security measures on their products. ISIS will continue
to use these to communicate, and the CIA will continue to try and catch up with
their own technological firms. The game goes on…
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