by Noah Shachtman, Wired

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.

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. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”

Read the rest at this link.

by Eileen Sullivan, AP

Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.

Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he’s seen in more than a decade.

“All it’s lacking is a spark,” McEntire said in the report.

It’s reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s—right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups.

Last October, someone from the Ohio Militia posted a recruiting video on YouTube, billed as a “wake-up call” for America. It’s been viewed more than 60,000 times.

“Things are bad, things are real bad, and it’s going to be a lot worse,” said the man on the video, who did not give his name. “Our country is in peril.”

The man is holding an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and he encourages viewers to buy one.

While anti-government sentiment has been on the rise over the last two years, there aren’t as many threats and violent acts at this point as there were in the 1990s, according to the report. That movement bore the likes of Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people.

But McEntire fears it’s only a matter of time.

These militias are concentrated in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest and the Deep South, according to Mark Potok, an SPLC staff director who co-wrote the report. Recruiting videos and other outreach on the Internet are on the rise, he said, and researchers from his center found at least 50 new groups in the last few months.

The militia movement of the 1990s gained traction with growing concerns about gun control, environmental laws and anything perceived as liberal government meddling.

The spark for that movement came in 1992 with an FBI standoff with white separatist Randall Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Weaver’s wife and son were killed by an FBI sniper. And in 1993, a 52-day standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, resulted in nearly 80 deaths. These events rallied more people who became convinced that the government would murder its own citizens to promote its liberal agenda.

Now officials are seeing a new generation of activists, according to the report. The law center spotlights Edward Koernke, a Michigan man who hosts an Internet radio show about militias. His father, Mark, was a major figure in the 1990s militia movement and served six years in prison for charges including assaulting police.

Last year, officials warned about an increase in activity from militias in a five-year threat projection by the Homeland Security Department.

“White supremacists and militias are more violent and thus more likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks on the scale of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,” the threat projection said.

A series of domestic terrorism incidents over the past year have not been directly tied to organized militias, but the rhetoric behind some of the crimes are similar with that of the militia movement. For instance, the man charged with the April killings of three Pittsburgh police officers posted some of his views online. Richard Andrew Poplawski wrote that U.S. troops could be used against American citizens, and he thinks a gun ban could be coming.

The FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Michael Heimbach, said that law enforcement officials need to identify people who go beyond hateful rhetoric and decide to commit violent acts and crimes. Heimbach said one of the bigger challenges is identifying the lone-wolf offenders.

One alleged example of a lone-wolf offender is the 88-year-old man charged in the June shooting death of a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Dale’s Notes: notice how they categorize “militias” with “domestic terrorists” and “racists.”  As I’ve pointed out many times, most of the white supremacist/Nazi groups in the U.S. are made up almost entirely of undercover federal agents.  Note also the tenuous tie this writer attempts to make with “recent domestic terrorism” events and the militia movement.

This is the kind of brainwashed thinking we’re up against, folks.  I’m sure Ms. Sullivan’s AP handlers were more than happy with the mis-characterization and misrepresentation that she input into this “reporting.”

by Sebastian Smith, AFP

A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.

“For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.

“This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”

Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”

Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.

Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.

“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.

“So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”

In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.

Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.

“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.

However, she stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another.”

She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”

An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.

“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”

Even as US troops become increasingly focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, more attention is being paid to violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.

The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in the suburbs of the US capital, Washington.

This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined Al-Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.

In May, five Miami men were found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Tower.

Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroy a US military plane.