A guy comes into the office at nine in the morning. He powers up his computer and prepares coffee while waiting for the machine to boot up (yes, it’s on Windows). Once logged in, he fires up Firefox and opens several bookmarked tabs, which include Bloglines, Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Icerocket. And he reads a couple of hundred blogs before lunchtime, noting down links and quoting several passages from notable blogs.

This guy could either be a career pro-blogger or someone seriously slacking at work. Or he could be a CIA analyst.

Welcome to the world of open-source intelligence. According to the Washington Times, the CIA has disclosed that government is increasing its activities in monitoring blogs and other new media for “rich information” that they are unable to monitor and mine otherwise.

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

“A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we’re getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to … people putting information on there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” said Naquin.

With the loads of crap circulating the blogosphere these days (rumours, downright false information, overly opinionated discussions, or simply useless stuff), it’s getting more difficult to determine what’s credible and not. These guys must have pretty sophisticated software to weed out the bad from the relevant information. But of course, human wisdom is still best when discretion is needed. Of course, they do. They’re the CIA.

So you’d better think twice before hitting publish after writing that potentially incriminating piece, or that writeup that’s potentially a risk to national security. Big brother is watching!