EurasiaNet.org (by way of The Atlantic) has a story that covers President Islam Karimov’s call earlier this year to pay attention closer to the Internet, an announcement that led some young Internet users to think twice about saying anything political on the Internet.

The government interestingly decided not to shut down access to all corners of the Internet. With Facebook’s popularity growing in the country and potentially becoming a forum for political dissent, it has become a tool for monitoring. According to the story:

The security services “rely on Facebook and other social media sites to extract information about citizens,” said a Tashkent-based journalist who writes about media and technology. The journalist said that when a source was interviewed for a job at the National Security Service (SNB), his interviewers had printed copies of most of his Facebook activity.

Other media outlets added their own analysis of what the latest-known example of social media monitoring in the name of security means. The main takeaway: Expect this sort of practice by government agencies to grow and evolve.

The practice of tracking mass sentiment, dubbed as “memetracking,” is still in its infancy, according to Johan Bollen, a professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He told The Atlantic:

“Right now, analysis is very specialized. We’re looking at how people feel about very particular topics. … There’s a lot room for growth in deeper semantic analysis: not just learning what people feel about something, but what people think about things. There are 250 million people on Twitter. … if you could perform even a shallow analysis of people’s opinions about something, their semantic opinions, you can learn a lot from the wisdom of the crowd that could be leveraged.”

Alex Pareene of Salon noted that the CIA news came days after Department of Homeland Security claims that they were not “actively monitoring” social media. He says it’s smart to suspect that several government agencies from the CIA down to the NYPD are monitoring social media. “What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it,” Pareene writes.

So basically, this is only the beginning.