AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook
McLEAN, Virginia (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. — At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the first appearance of CIA social-media collection in the corpus, and it lands at a moment when the raw material is exploding: Dick Costolo told the Web 2.0 Summit in October 2011 that Twitter had grown from 100 million to 250 million tweets per day, with iOS 5 integration tripling signup rates. The 5 million tweets a day the agency's Open Source Center ingests is therefore a small slice of a firehose that is doubling on platform timescales.
The AP's framing matters as much as the number: the operation sits in an unassuming Virginia industrial park under an 'open source' banner, meaning publicly posted Twitter and Facebook content is being treated as a standing intelligence feed rather than a case-by-case research task.
First-order effects
- The CIA gains a continuous, real-time read on global public sentiment and events from Twitter and Facebook, institutionalizing social media as a day-to-day collection discipline inside the Open Source Center rather than an ad-hoc tool.
- Twitter and Facebook's public streams become de facto monitored infrastructure: every user posting publicly is now writing into a channel that a major intelligence agency reads at a rate of up to 5 million items a day.
Second-order effects
- Platform data access turns into a strategic asset — whoever controls APIs, search surfaces like Twitter's new 'Top News' and 'Top People' features, and firehose pricing effectively sets the terms on which governments can listen, giving Twitter and Facebook leverage they have never had over state customers.
- Commercial social-media monitoring vendors gain a new class of buyer as other agencies and allied services look to replicate the Open Source Center's capability rather than build it from scratch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, intelligence budgets and hiring shift toward open-source mining of public platforms, eroding the practical boundary between 'public' posting and state surveillance and forcing a policy reckoning over what users can expect when they tweet.
- The platforms' own product decisions — search features, authentication flows, distribution deals like the iOS 5 integration — start shaping national-security capability indirectly, because each change alters what collectors can see and how fast.
The trend: As social platforms scale into primary channels for public expression, intelligence agencies are shifting collection from classified intercepts toward standing ingestion of open social media.