FBI eyes monitoring social networks

Users of social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter may have to watch what they do online - the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is planning to continuously monitor the global output of these services.

 

A blog post on science-oriented website NewScientist.com said the FBI claims it can use data pulled from these services to better respond to - and even foresee - crises.

 

The FBI has quietly released details of its plans to continuously monitor these social networks, NewScientist.com added.

 

"The bureau's wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search "publicly available" material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of 'breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats,'" NewScientist.com said.

 

It said the FBI, in a document released January 19, is looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI.

 

Potential contractors were invited to reply by February 10.

 

Under the plan, FBI agents can display tweets and other information captured by the system on a map, where they can add layers of other data.

 

Such data may include the locations of US embassies and military installations, details of previous terrorist attacks and the output from local traffic cameras.

 

Also, the document suggests that the bureau wants to use social media to target specific users or groups of users.

 

"It notes that agents need to 'locate bad actors...and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions.'  It also states that the bureau will use social media to create 'pattern-of-life matrices' -- presumably logs of targets' daily routines -- that will aid law enforcement in planning operations," NewScientist said.

 

Crystal ball

 

NewScientist.com said the document also suggests that the FBI believes it can use social media to "[p]redict likely developments in the situation or future actions taken by bad actors (by conducting, [sic] trend, pattern, association, and timeline analysis)."

 

But it said the FBI did not immediately comment on how this analysis might work.

 

"But the idea of turning agents into digital soothsayers is plausible: researchers working at Facebook and in academia have shown that social media can be used to infer many things about an individual, including the existence of friendships that are not declared on social networking sites and the location of users who have not revealed where they are based," it said.

 

EFF warnings

 

While the FBI claims it will use "publicly available" information, the Electronic Frontier Foundation - a digital rights advocacy group - warned of possible unwelcome impacts.

 

EFF's Jennifer Lynch said many people post to social media expecting only their friends and followers are reading.

 

Such a sense of privacy gives people "the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse," she said.

 

"But these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US," Lynch said.

 

Inadvertently revealed

 

A separate article on tech site Mashable said the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC)  inadvertently revealed this plan in a market research request for a “Social Media Application.”

 

The supposed application is to provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI SIOC.

 

It is to have the capability for automated search of national news, local news, and social media networks, and provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted.

 

It can immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to providing critical infrastructural layers. — TJD, GMA News