It seems as if everyone is on twitter. Obama is on twitter. Katy Perry is on twitter. Even an 104 year old woman is on twitter. So there’s really no excuse if you are not. I’m on Twitter (@FFtechdotnet), and pretty much everyone else it to. Just the top 5 most followed people combined have 233 million followers. That’s a lot of people. So, it seems like it wouldn’t take that long for a gigantic government agency to join in on the global phenomenon. Well, they finally have. That’s right, the CIA have finally joined Twitter.

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@CIA is their address. The agency’s first tweet really shows why they made the account and how they really feel about joining social networking: ”

That’s right. In their first tweet, the CIA made a joke on themselves. For all of you out there who don’t get why this is funny, this type of response is called a Glomar response, named after a case involving the Soviet Union and a sunken sumbarine. Long story short, the we had to come up with a response to an information inquiry while also staying within the constitution. That’s when they came up with this “We can not confirm or deny blah blah blah.” response and named it after the company trying to fish the sumbarine out of the ocean, Global Marine. Since then, the CIA and other government bodies have been using this response constantly for any inquiry for information they would rather not give away.

Rather surprisingly, instead of a lighthearted response to this first tweet, the reaction (at least from some people) was something close to disgust. The NYC Review of Books, (@nybooks) really disagreed with the CIA on the desision to joke about themselves, and made this clear is a couple of tweets they put out days after the CIA join. The first was a ICYMI (in case you missed it), reminding people to read a book about the unethnical techniques of CIA torture. In later tweets, they highlight these one by one.

 

There were many more of these tweets from NYC Books, and none of them have been responded to by the CIA, even though all of them were sent to them and had @CIA tagged. Instead, the CIA released a tweet saying,

 

We will see if they do respond to the outrage or they just let NYC rant on and on without any recognition. Even though joining Twitter seemed to have no downside back when the agency thought it up, it now seem as they are regretting it a bit. They just let all those people who just spend their whole life negatively commenting on everything they can find a way to channel their rage at the government. And I’d bet they certainly didn’t expect that someone would go into such detail about the CIA’s unethnicality. We will just have to wait to see exactly how the CIA uses it’s account, either as a way to edjucte the public and really share informing data, unclassified or not, or wether it just says promotes themselves and doesn’t say anything helpful. If it does do that, you can’t really blame them. That’s what most people do.