The CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture arm invests in Visible Technologies

The CIA is getting a new tool to help root out the bad guys, and what they might be saying on blogs, Twitter and other social media sites. In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence community, has invested in Visible Technologies and entered into a technology development agreement with the Bellevue startup company.

Exact terms of the financing deal and just how the CIA plans to use the technology were not known, and Visible vice president of marketing Blake Cahill said he’s not even sure of the intelligence agencies’ plans. But Visible’s online tools do provide some insight into what the in intelligence agency might be interested in. Backed by Ignition Partners and advertising giant WPP, Visible has created a product called truCast that tracks what people are saying on social media sites.

Cahill –whose “social listening” tools are used by more than 100 corporations to track online conversations — said the Visible technology is not about spying on people.

“It is publicly available information and they are interested in tapping into insight and understanding of what is happening,” said Cahill, adding that the intelligence agencies could utilize the tool to track conversations going on overseas.

Visible’s technology allows organizations to string certain keywords together in order to make sense of certain topics. For example, it could track people who may be opposed or supportive of the Barack Obama administration.

“Our software could help to automate that process of collection and sentiment and measure the influence of who is saying it,” said Cahill. In addition, the service tracks the conversations going on around certain pieces of content, assigning a score to determine the value of the original conversation versus the comments.

And that’s part of what caught the CIA’s eye. Troy M. Pearsall, executive vice president of architecture and engineering at In-Q-Tel, said that the Visible technology provides keys “to understanding the breadth and depth of the online social landscape.”

“Its platform delivers a clear and comprehensive view of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue,” Pearsall added in a statement.

Visible has raised a total of $23.5 million, including the investment from In-Q-Tel. Last week, the company announced an additional $2 million in debt financing.

Cahill said the company is moving deeper into other government work, with other contracts in the public sphere in the works. “Just like consumers talking about brands, citizens are talking about government,” he said.

In-Q-Tel has placed other bets in the social media arena, namely an investment in monitoring service Attensity. In-Q-Tel made its first investment in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company in 2002.

Meanwhile, the Sourcing Seattle blog reports that Kelly Pennock has been named as chief technology officer at Visible, the third CTO at the company in the past three years. That follows the appointment earlier this year of CEO Dan Vetras, a high-tech veteran who previously worked at Talisma and Captura. – TechFlash

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