The Company Blogs

THE CIA now has its own bloggers. In a bow to the rise of internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting weblogs... It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to finding useful information in the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia on the net.

The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide website, part of a rechristened CIA office for monitoring, translating and analysing publicly available information, called the DNI Open Source Centre. The centre, which made its debut this month, marks the latest wave of reorganisation in response to the failures of intelligence collection before the September 11, 2001, attacks...

And we wonder where our trolls come from.

On every major progressive blogsite I know of, you can find at least a few people who repeatedly come back repeating Dear Leader's talking points and trying to derail intelligent comments. The pattern of attack is almost identical. The writing styles are very similar. And often distinct handles are used, with messages being hammered in all day on multiple threads.

You don't see them here for a couple of reasons: one, I'm a very small fry in the bloggy sea and don't draw enough attention. Two, if you strike me as a troll, I delete you. Not very fair and balanced of me, but then, trolls aren't either.

I'm not saying the unwanted posters monopolizing threads are CIA. Most likely, not. Nor CSC/DynCorp. Nor Lockheed-Martin. Nor a host of others. But whoever they are, amateur TheoCons Witnessing their role models, RNC astro-turfers trying to spread their talking points, ignorant crackers eating cheetos in their mom's basement and reading Soldier of Fortune, or corporate toads trying to please a boss hog, there may be a few professionals lurking about, listening in, and taking notes.

Thanks to Defense Tech for the tip.