CIA's "Vengeful Librarians" Track Up To 5 Million Tweets Per Day
Tasked with monitoring real-time sentiments about American actions abroad, the group's work often finds its way to the president's desk.
Hello, world. The CIA is watching you tweet. And they’re putting your commitment to Facebook stalking to shame.
The Associated Press reports that the agency monitors up to 5 million tweets a day, along with Facebook, local print, radio and online media sources, chat rooms and pretty much any other publically avaialble content available overseas.
The analysts tasked with the job are part of the agency's Open Source Center, but they have a much more colorful nickname: "The Vengeful Librarians." Essentially, they’re responsible for monitoring real-time sentiments about American actions abroad, and predicting possible moments of unrest or popular revolution, like the Arab Spring.
Started in response to a 9/11 Commission recommendation, the group's official focus is on counterterrorism efforts. But the AP explains that the CIA analysts have more recently begun to devote themselves to monitoring mood and movement via social media, a task that has increased in importance since the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. Doug Naquin, the director of the Open Source Center, told the AP that their analyses almost always make it into the daily intelligence briefings given to President Obama.
Apparently, it takes a certain sort of personality to make a good analyst, and Naquin’s description of an ideal staffer has a hint of a casting call to it. The AP writes:
The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."
Although the exact number of analysts is classified, the AP says there are at least several hundred of them. Some are based in an office building in Virginia, while others work around the world, often at U.S. embassies.
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