Is the CIA following you on Twitter?

'I want to see your tweets.'

If you’re using Twitter for terrorist-organizing activities, watch out:

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

via Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Visible crawls over these sites twice a day, scores each post as positive, negative, mixed or neutral, and rates the influence of the poster. There are some social networks where you’re free from the government’s prying eyes though.

Wired’s Noah Shachtman reports that Visible does not crawl through closed social networks, like Facebook, and I assume other sites with privacy settings and passwords like MySpace and Friendster.  It sounds like it’s basically limited to what is accessible in the public domain, i.e. what is Google-able.

I’m not sure how this article will be rated by Visible.  For good measure, I’d just like to end this post by saying that I love America.

(Hat tip to fellow patriot, Marc Flores.)