IT ISN'T ONLY CRYPTOME THE FEDS WILL BE WATCHING....

Earl at Prometheus 6 reports that intelligence agencies are going to start monitoring blogs. For all of you out there who get goofy, untraceable .mil and .gov details on your sitemeter this should come as no surprise, it's been happening informally for a long time. Most so-called spooks are simply Ph.d's or bright, global, analytical thinkers with an affinity for seeing patterns among disparate variables. They have varied interests and like anybody else get bored at work and surf the web where the blogosphere - at it's best anyway - offers well-informed discussion and provocative ideas.

It would be really amusing to see how NSA type computers would pull out patterns from the blogosphere as a whole based upon particular keywords and discover what type of events cause the widest memetic dispersion. Of course, once the DARPA geniuses do that and discover the particularly potent emotive-memetic " triggers " the temptation to direct the conversation or engage in disinformation will become overwhelming...which will then ruin some of the blogosphere's value as a source of intelligence.

Hard to keep that cake once you've eaten it.  ¶ 8:05 PM