Loss of Privacy

From Democracy Now! You can read the transcript while watching the video.

Investors at the CIA and Google are backing a company called “Recorded Future” that monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. The news comes amidst Google’s so-called “Wi-Spy” scandal, that refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private Wi-Fi networks over the last three years.

The Pentagon has been accused of spying on a whistleblower website that specialises in leaking top secret documents. The US Army has already labeled the website as a security threat. Now Wikileaks – which won Amnesty Internationals news media award last year – has issued a statement claiming its editors are being investigated: WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation, – the claim published on Tweeter said.

WikiLeaks has built their reputation of breaking extremely important stories, so it’s hard to put a conspiracy theory label on this story. Given the fact that the CIA is involved, we should be watching this story closely. We’ll have to wait to find out on April 5th what’s going on.

You can follow what’s happening on WikiLeaks’ twitter account or their website. If you feel so inclined, you can donate to WikiLeaks here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

More information at Wired, Gawker, and Harper’s Magazine.

Former CIA officials told ABC News that the prison in Lithuania was one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al-Qaeda operatives captured around the world. Thailand, Romania, Poland, Morocco, and Afghanistan have also been identified as countries that housed secret prisons for the CIA. President Barack Obama ordered all the sites closed shortly after taking office in January.

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.

More here and here.