The CIA Finally Joins Twitter, After Years of Mining it for Intel

Membership Ticker

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you—especially at a moment like this. That's really it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a much shorter than normal three-week window, by November 5, so we can keep right on doing it. Please pitch in early to help us get there.

$250,000

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

The Central Intelligence Agency—which only recently kicked its nasty habit of torturing detainees for little or no actionable intelligence and overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments—is now officially on Twitter. The agency’s account is verified. On Friday, @CIA sent its first tweet, which reads as follows (warning—dorky spy humor ahead):

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

“Just remember: This is a messaging arm of a spy agency, not a silly channel for CIA Internet jokes,” PolicyMic‘s Jared Keller wrote on Friday.

The CIA finally joined the Twitterverse after years of mining it for intel. Analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center (who other agents jokingly refer to as “vengeful librarians“) sift through millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and other public data to get a sense of the collective attitudes of groups and regions overseas. The “librarians” track up to five million tweets a day. “Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center’s director, Doug Naquin,” according to an Associated Press exclusive report in November 2011.

Nowadays, the State Department is actively trolling terrorists on Twitter. Let’s see if the CIA can top that.

UPDATE, July 7, 2014, 5:14 p.m. ET: