Worldwide Twitter and Facebook 'Attitudes' monitored by CIA

That tin-foil hat won't help you this time.

An in-depth report by Associated Press has revealed a specialized team in CIA's open source Centre are following "up to 5 million tweets per day."  Alongside this, they're following Facebook status updates and other "open internet media."

The objective of this Orwellian-sounding idea is to do the very Minority Report-esque task of predicting if or when a region may become destabilised and turn to citizen civil warfare, the killing of Osama Bin Laden or the Libyan protests are examples of this.

The team is made up of analysts located in one of a multitude of the CIA offices in Virginia, with the coined name "The Vengeful Librarians."  Not a nickname at all, as you realise these people are at the top of their scoring-masters-degrees-in-library-science games.  The group were formed post-9/11 as a counter-terrorist front, and were turned to social media monitoring following Iran's Green Revolution in 2009.  The Vengeful Librarians have, since then, used intelligence to predict most of recent events, including successfully predicting the Libyan revolution.

The information goes right to the top, in the form of Obama's daily intelligence brief, making this whole thing seem much more "Big Brother" ish.  However, a specific mention was made in the report to the intelligence accument group taking "open" communications.  Set your profiles to private, and you'll be fine.

Source: Associated Press