CIA searchs for new tech

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is to continue its Silicon Valley investment programme.

The CIA opened up a venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, as part of a five-year experiment as a way of acquiring technologies to enhance national security.

In-Q-Tel chief executive Gilman Louie told the San Jose Mercury News the firm would continue as there was a new urgency to find technology to make sense of all the unstructured data floating around on the internet and elsewhere.

Projects in which the CIA has recently invested include Zaplet, a collaboration software specialist that developed a collaborative email application which the CIA tied in with another of its projects, Tacit.

Tacit helps people find other people on the web working on the same problem. A user of Zaplet could call up Tacit's software, and then email people they did not know about previously.

When combined with Zaplet, Tacit's product can help to avoid the sort of breakdown that happened before last year's terrorist attacks.

In one case, for example, the FBI's Phoenix and Minneapolis bureaus separately pursued people they suspected of taking flight lessons to prepare for terrorist attacks, but never talked with each other.