CIA Monitors Blogs and Social Networks, Feels "Intelligence" Part of Agency Atrophying

Washington, D.C. - Wired Magazine reported that the Central Intelligence Agency was investing in monitoring social networking. In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, has invested in Visible Technologies, a company that creates software to monitor social networking sites.

However, an early test of the system shows that the software may be overrated. While the software could alert the CIA to trends in selected countries, as was the case in Iran elections and Twitter, the weakness is that most Tweets, shared pictures and blog posts are either inane self centered ramblings or else cut and paste from others' ramblings. So far attempts to sort out the stupid from the relevant has been an impossible task.

"Some people say that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about," said CIA Civil Rights Liaison Greg Larson, "But for God's sake, people need to hide a lot more. We're not talking for legal reasons, we're talking common human decency. Blogging your shits, family issues and pictures of your genital sores are TMI!"

TMI has literally become the name the CIA has attached to the software's problems. Inundation with useless crap has become the biggest weakness to the program and could be exploited by enemies and hackers.

"We saw many supporters of the Iranian Protesters change their Twitter location to Tehran to jam Iran's outdated security monitoring," said CIA expert Jessie Clangley, "But other groups such as Hamas, Al Qaeda and Anonymous could be strategically or dickishly send false data up in bursts that can confuse and overwhelm the system. This could lead to issues like the Japanese telegram jam before the attack on Pearl Harbor, or worse, Anonymous sending CP from /b/ into our system and getting the FBI on our case. That's a headache we don't need."

CIA has currently not included Facebook in order to avoid incessant App invites and MySpace to prevent the system from falling into a blinkie induced epileptic seizure.