Earlier this month, Wired magazine (October 19, 2009) reported that the CIA has been investing in Visible Technologies – a software firm that tracks social media sites and networks such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and even Amazon. According to Wired, customers of Visible Technologies receive “real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.” This sounds innocuous enough, especially when the technology is used by Microsoft (as it presently is) to monitor customer comments about its new Windows 7 package. But let’s face it: If the CIA is investing in this technology, there must be a catch. And there is.

Other uses of Visible Technologies’ software – although completely legal – are more likely to raise an eyebrow and provide insight into the CIA’s motivation. One client of Visible includes Hormel which processes SPAM (not the electronic kind) and other meat products. When targeted by animal rights groups for their practices, Hormel used Visible to help monitor the campaigns of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA.) Certainly, anything posted or said on open source networks is public information. Since there’s not much that can be done, activists would be wise to never tip their strategic hat too much on these open source sites. Clearly, the corporate world is watching and reading.

What makes the corporate tracking of the grassroots and activist communities so disturbing is that our government is investing tax dollars into Visible Technologies which suggests that the CIA has both a financial and a tactical interest in the success of this spy software. Simply put, one can expect the government to use this technology to monitor the conversations of activists. Already, we have seen the arrest of an activist after his “Tweets” (messages posted to Twitter) were monitored by law enforcement. In late September, Elliot Madison was arrested during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh for allegedly using a radio scanner to track police movements and then post information to protesters using the social networking site Twitter. (Apparently, the government can monitor activists, but activists are not allowed to monitor the government.)

How are we to make sense of all of this concern over media communication? It’s simple, really. Political power has always rested among those with the ability to master the art of communication while controlling the flow of information. In the pre-literate, oral societies of early Greece, citizens having political power were those proficient in the verbal communication of poetry. As argued by historical Eric Havelock, poetry was not merely expressive but a political necessity since the devices of meter and parallelism allowed leaders to easily recall the history of Greek politics. In early scribal societies, those who were literate were treated as royal. The medieval Catholic Church was able to maintain its authority due to the limited number of people who could read the scripture and offer alternative interpretations. Today, powerful figures seek to control the flow of information on social network media to maintain their privileged positions.

The interrelationship of media technology and political power suggests that whoever controls information maintains the upper hand in any political struggle. The good news is that today, new forms of media are inherently threatening to the status quo because they alter the patterns of social and political communication. Their introduction into society necessarily creates a cultural or generational “lag” during which time those holding authority are only beginning to learn the technologies of the younger generation and recognizing their potential for subversive use. Video cameras had been used by citizen groups for quite some time capturing instances of police excessive force before cops themselves finally bridged the generational gap and use video footage to their advantage via such television programs as COPS, via mounted cameras in squad cars, and even by videotaping protesters at rallies. During the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, activists from an array of social groups used cell phones to coordinate minute-to-minute decision-making, strategizing and even civil disobedience. Today, law enforcement and government “intelligence” agencies are finally catching up with activists in their attempt to use social networking sites for their own advantage.

The lesson, then, is clear. For activism to maintain its element of surprise and effectiveness, it needs not only to stay abreast of new and emerging social communication technologies. It also needs to play a role in their creation. The rapidity with which new technologies are invented and disseminated to the general public means that they have a short subversive shelf-life. Activists wishing to avoid the watchful eye of government must remain gigabytes ahead of social networking technology.