CIA acknowledges the power of blogs

According to the Washington Times, the Central Intelligence Agency is taking advantage of political bloggers' research capabilities:

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center's creation in November. [Washington Times]

I think that the CIA's recognition of the citizen journalists' contributions represents an important development in intelligence gathering. At the same time, one has to wonder whether there is any overlap between the CIA's gathering of unclassified intelligence and classified programs involving the profiling of American citizens, such as the NSA's domestic spying program and the FBI's monitoring of political activists.

Another interesting question is which blogs the CIA is reading for "social perspectives . . . and what the general feeling is" about White House policies. If the Bush administration has been using the leading far-right conservative blogs to gauge public opinion - like Michelle Malkin or Little Green Footballs - then President Bush's continual slide in the polls should come as no surprise.

"CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs" [Washington Times]