In 2009, Wired revealed that In-Q-Tel was making an investment in Visible Technologies, a Seattle-based Internet marketing firms that makes a social media-monitoring platform of the same name. The company, which describes itself as “the leader in social media monitoring and analytics solutions,” mines information from various social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, to provide real-time intelligence to its customers. For businesses, this might provide information about public reactions to its brand or products. For the intelligence community, this could mean gauging public reaction to U.S. policies abroad, or information about a country on the verge of revolution. Visible Technologies could provide “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” an In-Q-Tel spokesman told Wired’s Danger Room blog. Though In-Q-Tel’s investment does not guarantee the technology will be used by the CIA or any other government agency, the goal of such investment funding it to spur the development of products that would eventually be of use to the intelligence community
Source(s): Visible Technologies, Wired