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The Open Source Center, which replaced the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, is doing more analysis and outreach than its predecessor and is also exploring new media, said Mr. Naquin in a recent speech (pdf).

“We’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” he said.

“We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there’s Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs…. A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.”

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Many power plant networks and other essential pieces of America’s infrastructure are owned, operated and protected by corporations.

Some say security of these vital networks should be the sole domain of the federal government because it is a national security concern. Critics say government monitoring of Internet usage -- even for malicious programming -- is a slippery slope toward Big Brother-style surveillance, and private industry can better secure their own networks.

President Barack Obama declared in May that cyber security would be a national priority, creating a cybersecurity czar in the process. But it’s unclear how far that position’s authority will extend once the slot is filled.

In announcing the czar, Obama pledged the government wouldn’t monitor the Internet or mandate security standards to the private sector.

But the Cyber Security Act of 2009 -- currently being debated in Congress -- would give the president authority to shut down certain private networks in the event of a big attack.