According to this Associated Press story, the tinfoil beanie hat crowd was right all along: "In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians' also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly."

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/TGZ75URQ6DKTCNXV3RV36ZKALQ Matthew

    Why should people be surprised that publicly available information is being read by somebody?  If you don’t want everybody to read about your trip to the grocery store, then don’t tweet about it!

    • doomcake

      or use a codeword for grocery store

      • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

        Preferably a code word that will send up lots of red flags?  “I am at the TORTURE HUT picking up MURDER JUICE for my cereal.”

        • Cowicide

          Preferably a code word that will send up lots of red flags?  ”I am at the TORTURE HUT picking up MURDER JUICE for my cereal.”

          Ah yes… brings back memories… like Jam Echelon Day

          Maybe it’s time to bring that TERRORIST PLOT back?

          ATF DOD WACO RUBY RIDGE OKC OKLAHOMA CITY MILITIA GUN HANDGUN MILGOV ASSAULT RIFLE TERRORISM BOMB DRUG KORESH PROMIS MOSSAD NASA MI5 ONI CID AK47 M16 C4 MALCOLM X REVOLUTION CHEROKEE HILLARY BILL CLINTON GORE GEORGE BUSH WACKENHUT TERRORIST.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Oliver-Schmieding/100000452523362 Oliver Schmieding

            hitler mossad ahmadinechad cocain mexican revolution ows c4 plane dump site contagion aflatoxin supreme rothschild nasa jfk obama arkancide?

    • Guest

      Why should citizens be surprised that publicly available information is being read the US government?

      FYT

    • travtastic

      Because: they have power over people that the intended audience does not, and you shouldn’t have to assume that the government is reading your tweets, whether they’re capable or not.

      When they are, this means that you’re living in a police state, and to say “But it’s public!” is like saying “If you don’t have anything to hide, why do you care?”

  • Michael Finkenthei

    or use “grocery store” as a code word… just hum along…

  • http://twitter.com/SHQtallahassee Secret Headquarters

    Crap. That means they know all about my plot to tweet bad “Dude, Where’s My Car” jokes.

    Is NOTHING sacred anymore?

  • http://www.theblacklaser.net/ Joe The Wizard

    Man, I need to start making more dick jokes on my Twitter then.

    • http://twitter.com/LambdaCalculus Robert Menes

      Nah, step it up a bit and make it more interesting… post the most depraved things you can think of. :)

      • http://www.theblacklaser.net/ Joe The Wizard

        Pictures of newborns?

  • http://twitter.com/LauraALiddell Laura Liddell

    #itsasaddaywhen you’re so uncool even the CIA won’t follow your tweets :(

  • http://twitter.com/Redlakespirit Ron Leith

    The CIA and a Crack House have more in common than they realize. default4202 {“method”:”validate”,”params”:[],”id”:1,”jsonrpc”:”2.0″}

  • http://twitter.com/travyeso travis

    Yeah, I always assume this is the case. This is why my best tweets are when I’ve lost all hope and subsequently all concern for intrusion or authoritarian consequences. 

  • http://twitter.com/GreenEarl Earl Allen Boek

    When the FBI started Swatting into peace activist homes I was the only one that showed
    up at their local place of business with a sign saying FBI Terrorist.  Cops were called, always are, and asked my if they had come down yet to beat the shit outta me?  Naw, they don’t work that way, it’s broad daylight on a city street.  Esp 6:11

  • Mister44

    I hope they like updates on what my cat is doing.

    Hey – what do the CIA and a psycho ex-girlfriend have in common?

  • http://saberuk.pip.verisignlabs.com/ SaberUK

    The CIA are reading public information? How SHOCKING. We must curb their powers to read public information immediately!

  • illicitizen

    I’m just going to start DMing them with links to my band. Nothing clears a room like that.

  • Kaibaman

    This feels just like in Japan were a Police does all day long try and see when people are downloading things “Illegally” 24/7…Why the hell are they reading our status’s and tweets without a Court Warrant anyway…doesn’t our Government have something better else to do then READING OUR INFORMATION!

  • Jer

    If you actually R the FA you would see that this story is specifically about the fact that the CIA is reading tweets from overseas in foreign languages and attempting to further their mission as an intelligence agency that is supposed to be gathering intelligence about other countries.

    They probably are also reading the tweets of US citizens, but that isn’t what this story is about. 

    (And it is shocking that the CIA – publishers of the CIA World Factbook – would be attempting to perform data mining operations about what’s going on in the world.  No wait – not shocking, what’s that word – oh yeah right “so obvious that the branding of AP EXCLUSIVE on the linked story makes me think that this is The Onion’s world and we just live in it’).

  • Nadreck
  • Guest

    I’m just bummed out that well paid analysts are being paid well to do this. 

    • EvilSpirit

      Given the volume of information involved, it’d *take* well-paid analysts to extract most of the useful conclusions.

      • Guest

        Which useful conclusions would those be? That  “I’m never gonna give you up?” or “The internet is for porn”?

        Which one of those keeps nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.

        • rabidpotatochip

          “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and drop a nuke on your ass”.

        • EvilSpirit

          I hope you do realize that’s exactly my point.

          • Guest

            wasn’t so clear, but I do believe you!

  • http://twitter.com/lacalaca85 Molnár László

    Only 5 million? That’s nuffin’ compared to Google.

  • rabidpotatochip

    Craaaaap…. just the other day I posted that I ate so much I might explode….

    But on a more serious note, my Facebook account is a stream of random holidays, interesting facts about random mammals and just generally proving I’m not dead.  As I type that, I realize how much it actually mirrors my offline life….

  • firefly the great

    Well I’m glad to see someone is. Hi CIA!

  • Monique Lopez
  • Daniel Smith

    Don’t worry i know guys at the OSC and they are, well lets just say that there are greater fears out there. But yes, all these guys do all day and night is poor over freely available unstructured data (e.g. twitter, facebook, Google+, linkedIn, blogs and comments (yes this one) and news sources) dumping it into databases and using software like Palantir http://www.palantirtech.com/ to mine it for relationships in an effort to exploit this information for intelligence and tracking purposes.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HH5V3XQCG4FPVDR4XDXWXGTHPY dfhb

    There is a difference between a normal person reading your tweet and the CIA. When a normal person reads it they take it in, give it a thought or two, and move on. I would presume the CIA would archive it with some sort of classification related to how much of a threat you are, and come back periodically to check their assumptions. Also let’s not forget that they are able to get to your personal information. This is something a normal tweet follower can’t do. Maybe that’s why it’s creepy to think a government agency would be watching posts on something like Twitter. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JWEACX7L5UK2DJK3XA7YWP67WY Lindsay

    What a boring job!…reading every single facebook status and tweet….

    “work, school, then home”
    “mmm i love diet coke”
    “Just saw (insert movie here) with (tagged friends here). Total blast!”

    ….seriously if I had to read that crap all day everyday for a living, I would probably shoot myself.