CIA tracks global pulse on twitter, facebook

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, an AP report said. From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt. But no one knows why they lost their allies in the region so quickly if they could predict everything. Some believe that CIA is only seeking to use this illegal surveillance system for spying on the world nations, but it can't use it to solve bigger puzzles. According to the director of the center, the CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission and was due to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation, but its several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - are spying on all the world nations and intrude into the people's most private and intimate moments. While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout US embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects. Director of the Center Doug Naquin said the most successful analysts 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." Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer," Naquin said. The center started focusing on social media during Iran's post-election unrests in 2009, led and directed by the US and its allies including the British embassy in Tehran, which failed to harm Iran. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said. The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day. After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion. Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate US-Pakistani relations. When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with speakers of Arabic and Turkish tweets charging that Mr. Obama favored Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab. In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of US intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region. The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said. "We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas they are monitoring has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in areas like Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country." Sites like Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries. As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic. So next time you are using Twitter, Facebook or other social media networks, take more care since the CIA officers are monitoring you while their bosses both in Langley and the White House both formally and individually have very intimate ties with Arab and other regional dictators in addition to the strategic security pacts that exist between the US and totalitarian regimes in the region.