Ian Fleming's James Bond had the gadgets, the girls, and of course, the Aston Martin.  But in the 21st Century, modern day spies and intelligence officers are spending less time shooting and more time...Tweeting?

It's no conspiracy theory, either.

According to NPR, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and others have full time staffs of translators and analysts devoted to monitoring social media traffic, all in the hopes of spotting the next uprising, coup or terrorist attack-- with little to go on but a status update.

Move over, Q.  The CIA has Tweet Deck.

"People realize this is much more than just doing a Google Search," an analyst speaking on condition of anonymity told NPR's Rachel Martin.

Yet it's not the same as typing in 'Al Qaeda' or 'Wikileaks' in Google News and clicking enter.  The type of information analysts and researchers are looking for is more granular.  An Al-Shabaab terrorist in Somalia could be talking to a comrade via Twitter.  Or he could be sharing tips and tricks via one of the many Islamist message boards the Agency--and 13 others--monitor every day.

But in an era where the average person has five or six emails to their name, determining where terrorists are tweeting from--as opposed to where they say they are tweeting from--is no less difficult.  It is well known that Al Qaeda's Inspire Magazine hosted a Gmail account that subscribers could use to organize and plan attacks throughout the globe.  Literally dozens of users took advantage of the service, and not all of them lived in countries like Yemen where they could be taken out by a Hellfire missile.

 As NPR put it, a terrorist could be tweeting from Yemen.  But he could also be from Ohio.

"We can't tell where individual posts are coming from," Doug Naquin, the director of the CIA's Open Source Center said in a one-on-one interview with NPR.  "But if there's any situation--let me put it broadly--in which we came across anything that involved U.S. domestic persons, we would either stop it or turn it over to one of our partners on the domestic side."

Translation: sic the FBI on them.

But in the era of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, the spying often goes both ways.  Popular websites such as cryptome.org, a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance, reaches millions of intelligence experts and conspiracy theorists alike.  The U.S. diplomatic cable leaks, i.e. Cablegate, are as ubiquitous as posts about Justin Bieber on LiveJournal.

Sometimes they get it wrong, and they get flatfooted.   The Arab Spring that toppled Mubarak, Ghadafi, and Saleh last year caught the intelligence analysts who monitor social media completely by surprise.  It was such an issue that Congress called CIA officials to grill them about it.

For a period of time, it appeared that Anonymous, LulzSec, and even al Jazeera were scooping the Agency. 

"The Internet is going from connecting people to connecting to things," said Naquin.  "People's thoughts that would never make it out of their homes are now available to everybody on the Internet."

And that's just how the CIA wants it.