CIA gets new venture capital chief to better mine all that data

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA (yes, the venture capital arm of the CIA), has a new CEO, Amit Yoran, who intends to make tools of the cybersecurity trade available to all U.S. intelligence agencies, reports the Mercury News. Yoran vows to help other spy agencies in getting the most advanced spy technology available.

"Many of the tools are classified once they're adopted by the spy community, but among the hottest in demand: better tools to mine and analyze large amounts of data, "sensing'' technologies and programs to find relationships among information where they aren't obvious, Yoran said.

Yoran, who was the government's cybersecurity chief until 2004, previously founded a technology start-up, Riptech, which Symantec purchased in 2002 for $145 million in cash.

"Technology is one of the biggest threats to our intelligence systems and one of the biggest opportunities,'' Yoran said.