Be Careful What You Tweet: CIA Monitoring Twitter, Facebook
By Sara Yin- November 4, 2011 02:20pm ET
Before you tweet an inside joke about a terrorist movie like "United 93" or "Munich," you should know—the CIA might start following you.
CIA employees known as "vengeful librarians" monitor Facebook and Twitter feeds, TV news channels and radio stations, Internet forums and chat rooms, and pretty much any form of media that's open to the public, according to the Associated Press, which received an exclusive tour of the nondescript brick building in Virginia where all this takes place.
Like the rest of us Twerps (defined: people on Twitter), these librarians anticipated the uprising in Egypt in February and obsessed over first-person accounts of the London riots and Vancouver brawl over the summer.
The department falls under the Open Source Center (OSC), which was created in 1995 by the Director of National intelligence upon the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
Its mission is to collect information available from "the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery," according to its Web site, and analyze the information, which is often used in the President's daily intelligence briefings. For instance, after Osama bin Laden was killed, the intelligence unit looked at social media to brief the White House on public opinion towards the matter.
The OSC began monitoring social media outlets in 2009 after seeing the role Twitter played in Iraq's Green Revolution, OSC director Dough Naquin told the AP.
As its director, Naquin can be publicly identified but the exact location of the center is classified information to prevent attacks, AP reports.
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