THE TERRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT TWITTER

The video about Facebook presented in my previous post shows clearly the link between the US intelligence agencies, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Facebook. This equally applies to Twitter which too is linked with In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA in 1999. The video below (transcript provided) refers specifically to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is doing to things that we tweet everyday, as well as its consequences.

The news about CIA's daily monitoring of Twitter has already been reported by the western (mostly alternative) media and blogs back in November 2011. The only local blog that can be traced reporting the news is Mummy Rokiah, who quoted an Associated Press report concerned but did not provide any link to it. Further, a subsequent important development occurred on 14 December 2011 when Twitter received a subpoena in Boston. This means what is initially  normal tweeting can develop into a legal issue.

It is therefore worthwhile to repeat the news here. After all, Twitter usage is very widespread in our country, and if we were not alerted to it then, we should be now.

Source: YouTube

More and more people put their lives on social media sites worldwide. Globally Facebook and Twitter have been effective tools for organizing major protests and overthrowing governments. Now members of the CIA department are paid to analyze what people are talking about on social media. This leaves many wondering about the intentions behind this practice.

Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist, gives us his thoughts to RT America journalist, Kristine Frazao, on why the CIA is concerned with your tweets. Wayne Madsen has written about intelligence in America for decades, having transitioned from a Naval officer to journalist, specializing in investigative reporting.

TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited. Links and images added. Emphasis mine. Video posted by RT America on YouTube on 28 December 2011.)

Kristine Frazao: Well, we are wrapping up 2011 and I think it bears looking at some of the ways things are changing in this world, particularly in the world of social media. Twitter and Facebook of course play a major role in the organization and globalization of the Arab Spring as well as Occupy Wall Street.
 

And it turns out the CIA actually has a entire department and people whose job is to sift through tweets. According to the Associated Press [reproduced at the end of post], they go through about 5 million tweets a day. This is worth noting because something is happening as a result of this.

And, really, this isn't discussed enough. On one hand, Twitter is public for the world to see, Facebook a little less so. But people are posting their business online.

So just a little earlier, I spoke to Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist, and asked "Shouldn't people expect that others, including the government, will read what they post?"
 

Wayne Madsen: Well absolutely, we have to look at where the seed money came from for the social network. We do know that the Central Intelligence Agency through In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm, provided a lot of these seed monies for many of these companies that develop the social networking operations programs.

So people have to be aware that when they put personal information online, they are basically doing the CIA's job for them. What if they just pack up all their personal information and give it to Langley, Virginia [CIA headquarters]?

Kristine Frazao: Let's talk about something that happened recently. We are still very new in terms of the results and consequences of social media, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But something happened very recently when the District Attorney's office in Boston a couple of weeks ago [14 December 2011] subpoena Twitter. They asked for user information and IP addresses of the people involved with Occupy Boston [movement].

We are showing you right now on the screen a copy of the subpoena (see below) that has apparently been leaked. And you can see here the Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Goldberger saying this information is needed for a criminal investigation, asking for the IP addresses of these specific names. He doesn't seem to understand that hashtag addresses are not Twitter handles. But let's find out Wayne, are we going to see more legal action like this in the future?
 

Wayne Madsen: I think so because what the intelligence agencies and law enforcement want to ascertain is, if they have one person under investigation, they want to see who their friends and family members are. So they are going to start building up this list and then run this up through their relational database's very sophiticated algorithm to find out who are friends with the person under surveillance, what kind of politics they practice, religious information, and this type of things.

You know, the CIA and FBI got in trouble for this kind of thing after Watergate, and the law was so restricted on the FBI that they couldn't keep clippings of people from the newspapers. There is a reason for it then and there should be a reason for it now. It's called fishing expedition. And the Federal Government can't go on fishing expedition unless they have a criminal predicate or probable cause. I don't think they have probable cause in Boston to look at people involved in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). That's called fishing expedition.

Kristine Frazao: But don't you think, Wayne, it's a little bit different then, I mean back in the time of Watergate in the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers were there but people were not posting their own personal information. That's exactly what happened. You said people are doing the CIA's job for them, but don't you think it's a little different when people choose to put their stuff out there, they choose to be on Twitter, they choose to be on Facebook. They go in knowing that other people out there, including the government, are going to see them.
 

Wayne Madsen: Well, there's obviously a problem now. People have no sense of privacy. They are willing to take their personal information and what they do, almost on a minute-to-minute basis in some cases, and put these online that get the CIA interested and all that, what movies they are seeing, what songs they like. But I think there's a sense that people have no sense of keeping or insuring their own privacy. It's the one way to avoid surveillance; they know that these social networking programs...

Kristine Frazao: But Wayne, it's 2011, this is how a lot of people, including myself as a journalist, find out about a lot of information, how I find out top news stories that I'm interested in. This is Twitter, this is how I keep in touch with my friends. What do you say to these people who say this is kind of old-fashion way of thinking. Social network is here to stay. The question is how best to deal with it.

Wayne Madsen: You are right. Obviously we use email which can also be looked at by the same agencies. The problem is, would you engage in a private conversation yelling on top of your voice on the city street? You wouldn't do that. So there are certain information you probably should be putting online for everyone to see.
 

Now obviously there are some social networks like LinkedIn that are used professionally by a lot of companies and businessmen. That kind of information could be of interest to CIA because they are doing this under open source collection that get them into the area of business competetive intelligence, and that's the type of information that the CIA really want. That could cost the company a lot of money if that information should end up in the hands of the government who would share it with potentially other countries, other agencies, in countries where they may be competitors to their own business interests.

Kristine Frazao: I think that's an important point and I think there's really a fine line here of the people you complain about, the infringement of their civil liberties. But they are happy as I am, to be honest, when you get on the iPhone recommendations about a great new food about three blocks radius away from where you are standing. So I think that's positive too. But here is one of the most common arguments that I hear, Wayne, and that is "Well, I'm not doing anything that I've to be ashamed of, I don't have anything to hide, so I don't care about such stuff or others." So I want to ask you, why should people care?
 

Wayne Madsen: Well, let just say somebody decide "I want to go down to Occupy Wall Street demonstration, then say I've no tie," but then they wind up on the list of support the movement group and then they wind up in various national security and intelligence databases. So the next time they go to the airport and try to get a flight, they are pulled aside as a potential security risk, merely because of something they have done. The government think they are some sort of a threat but they don't think what they are doing is a threat. But they are not the ones who make those decisions, the government make those decisions.

Kristine Frazao: It's certainly an interesting discussion and the one that needs to be held more, I would argue.

[End of transcript]

The Associated Press article referred to above is reproduced below:

CIA Following Twitter, Facebook

McLEAN, Va.  — 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.

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.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

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."

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 had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. "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 U.S.-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 Turkic tweets charging that 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 U.S. 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.

The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the rioting as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighborhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.

The army moved in, and traditional media reporting slowed to a trickle as local reporters were either trapped or cowed by government forces.

"But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook," the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations. The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.

"That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on," he said.

Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA's open source analysis throughout the crisis.

[Source: Newsmax. Links taken from Physorg's report on same AP article.]

According to Computerworld,

News of the CIA operation comes just days the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it is working on guidelines for protecting the privacy rights of U.S. citizens while it monitors social media sites.