Wednesday, August 10, 2011

CNN has lied after a threat to take down Facebook

CNN has lied after a threat to take down Facebook.

The video also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook has been selling user information to government agencies and giving it to security firms so they can spy on people.

Unsubstantiated ? Really ?

It was just on 31 March that Seattle's Tech Flash announced a new round of funding for just what CNN is denying:

Visible Technologies said today it has raised $6 million in a new funding round.

The round was led by previous backers of the Bellevue-based company, including Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP.

The social media monitoring company plans to use the funding for sales and to develop its global presence (it currently has offices in Seattle, New York and London). The company provides businesses with a 360 view of their social sphere by aggregating social media from multiple sources, and helps them make use of the chatter by transforming it into actionable marketing and business strategy.

Here's more:

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

And more:

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

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...

CNN lies.

SPQR

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