Recently we made a post about social networks being monitored by authorities. Well check out more info on the team of “ninja librarians” down in Washington.

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The Associated Press recently reported an “exclusive” story that the CIA monitors Twitter and Facebook as sources of intelligence. The AP reports that the CIA has several hundred “ninja librarian” analysts in an Open Source Center in an industrial park at some unspecified location in Virginia. If you’re surprised, you haven’t been paying attention.

The news that the CIA gets information from social networks isn’t new. The CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel has been openly investing in start-ups, such as Visible Technologies, that specialize in social media monitoring. What is novel about the AP story is that the reporter got to tour the CIA’s social media spying facility:

In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency’s Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly…

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, says the center’s director, Doug Naquin.

While the CIA’s center is focused on threats (and Tweeps) abroad, the Department of Homeland Security has indicated that it would like to set up its own center for doing this domestically. This seems to be coming as a surprise to some people, but it shouldn’t. If they weren’t monitoring what’s being said publicly on the Internet, it’d be a little disappointing, wouldn’t it?

It’s not like police secretly putting GPS trackers on cars and tracking someone without their knowledge. Reading Twitter and blogs isn’t “spying,”says Steve Ragan in the Tech Herald. Every time we say something publicly on the Web, we do so knowing that it will be seen by others, tracked and archived. Now you know that Google is not the only one watching.

Sadly, the CIA doesn’t actually have its own Twitter account. Instead, it appears to be one of the many Twitter lurkers.

Forbes