GG091023: Spook 2.0

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets — 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. … Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. — SEO will now have a double meaning. “Search Engine Optimization” or “Surveillance Engine Optimization.” Depending on who you want to read your blog. Adding the tag, “dirty bomb” to your posts could be good for a few hits. —