US intelligence agency, the CIA, has formed a "strategic partnership and technology development agreement" with Visible Technologies, a company specialising in data-mining social-networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. In-Q-tel was set up in 1999 to identify "innovative technology solutions to support the mission of the CIA and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community". Visible listens in to around half a million sites a day covering forums and blogs. It also crawls commercial sites with forums such as Amazon. The only sites it cannot reach are closed networks such as Facebook. Customers of Visible receive real-time feeds based on a series of keywords. These are scored as neutral, positive or negative depending on the message and the influence of the writer.
