In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

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Give it up for the analyst who pitched the idea of “open source intelligence” to the CIA – probably got got himself some nice funding and a sweet gig watching youtube all day.

But of course given the throngs of  willing participants  lining up to make information about themselves readily available for “public” consumption, and given  that they most often do so entirely for free and on their own time,  it would stupid of the gub’mint not to do this.  After all, some things really are  just too easy to resist -  like shootin’ “wild” birds in a pen.