Media News - Friday, February 08, 2008

CIA monitors YouTube for intelligence

In keeping with its mandate to gather intelligence, the CIA is watching YouTube. U.S. spies, now under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are looking increasingly online for intelligence; they have become major consumers of social media. ‘We're looking at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,’ said Doug Naquin, director of the DNI Open Source Center (OSC), in remarks to the Central Intelligence Retirees' Association last October. ‘We're looking at chat rooms and things that didn't exist five years ago, and trying to stay ahead. We have groups looking at what they call 'Citizens Media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet.’ In November 2005, the OSC subsumed the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which housed the agency's foreign media analysts. The OSC is responsible for collecting and analyzing public information, including Internet content. ‘What we're seeing [in] actuality is a decline, a relatively rapid decline, in the impact of the printed press - traditional media,’ said Naquin. ‘A lot more is digital, and a lot more is online. It's also a lot more social. Interaction is a much bigger part of media and news than it used to be.’ (Information Week)

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