ReadWriteWeb

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has a crack group of analysts tracking the Internet, including tweets and Facebook messages, that takes the pulse of the world. Located in McLean, Virginia analysts at the CIA Open Source Center are known as the "vengeful librarians" according to a report from the Associated Press. These librarians are tracking up to five million tweets a day from places like China, Pakistan and Egypt.

It is sometimes disconcerting to know what the U.S. intelligence complex is doing, right in your backyard. McLean is a beltway city in Northern Virginia that is best known for Tysons Corner, one of the shopping hubs of the East Coast. On the outskirts of the city limits there is also the George H.W. Bush CIA complex, on of the agency's main hubs in the D.C. region.

Gay Girl in Damascus a straight man in Scotland. When the "cousin" of blogger "Amina Abdallah Arraf" reported her abduction, people around the world were upset. This lesbian, half-American Syrian blogger seemed like someone they could relate to. Soon, questions arose and, in part due to the efforts of NPR's Andy Carvin, it came out that this was a fake account.

It turned out the blog was created by Tom MacMaster, an American living in Scotland. Regardless of his motivations, which seemed decent, it was a profoundly stupid move that will be seized by detractors to "prove" there are no oppressed bloggers in tyrannical regimes and no gay women in Arabic countries.

CIA.gov, the public website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, seems to be down for some people. Some ReadWriteWeb writers could not get it to load, though some could.

LulzSec, the group who prosecuted an attack against the U.S. Senate website are taking responsibility.

The problem with working to change United States foreign policy is that you're never really sure what it's going on behind the curtain. By the time you have submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and the government deems the information you're asking for safe, the present has passed into history. Which raises the question, will WikiLeaks bring us the transparency we need to be able to understand the internal workings of U.S. covert operations?

The world of top-secret America has grown exponentially since 9/11, with over 263 organizations created or reorganized. Much is happening in this world that is not only hidden from us, but from itself. A dark and Kafkaesque bureaucracy devoted to protecting us lurks beneath our democratic process, and we need to know its shape in order to have an accurate understanding of domestic and international policy.

With a product as ubiquitous as Facebook, the public has raised a number of privacy-related concerns including optional settings, privacy policies and data mining. In the past, ReadWriteWeb covered Facebook's plans to sell user data for market research purposes. However, today's article in the Boston Globe suggests that user information can be mined for more than just advertising purposes.