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FBI Wants New App to Wiretap the Internet
'Scraping' social network postings including Facebook and Twitter
The FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) posted a 'Request for Information (RFI)' online last week seeking companies to build a social network monitoring system for the FBI. The 12-page document (.pdf) spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by February 10, 2012.
It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps "using mash-up technology".
It says the application should collect "open source" information and have the ability to:
- Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
- Allow users to create new keyword searches.
- Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using color coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the "preferred" mapping options.
- Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.
- Immediately translate foreign language tweets into English.
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.
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New Scientist magazine reports today:
"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" -- Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier FoundationThe US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them. [...]
The use of the term "publicly available" suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be able to exempt themselves from the monitoring by making their posts private. But the desire of the US government to watch everyone may still have an unwelcome impact, warns Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.
Lynch says that many people post to social media in the expectation that only their friends and followers are reading, which gives them "the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse," says Lynch. "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".
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The BBC reports:
"Social networks are about connecting people with other people - if one person is the target of police monitoring, there will be a dragnet effect in which dozens, even hundreds, of innocent users also come under surveillance" -- Gus Hosein, Privacy InternationalThe FBI issued the request three weeks after the US Department of Homeland Security released a separate report into the privacy implications of monitoring social media websites.
It justified the principle of using information that users have provided and not opted to make private.
"Information posted to social media websites is publicly accessible and voluntarily generated. Thus the opportunity not to provide information exists prior to the informational post by the user," it says.[...]
The London-based campaign group, Privacy International, said it was worried about the consequences of such activities.
"Social networks are about connecting people with other people - if one person is the target of police monitoring, there will be a dragnet effect in which dozens, even hundreds, of innocent users also come under surveillance," said Gus Hosein, the group's executive director.
"It is not necessarily the case that the more information law enforcement officers have, the safer we will be.
"Police may well find themselves overwhelmed by a flood of personal information, information that is precious to those it concerns but useless for the purposes of crime prevention."
* * *
The Fierce Government website reports on 'refining raw social media into intelligence gold':
The notion that the future can be predicted by trends expressed in collective social media output is one that has gained increased currency in academic writing. A January analysis (.pdf) published by the Rand Corp. of tweets using the #IranElection hashtag during 2009 and early 2010 found a correlation between appearance of swear words and protests. The study also found a shift that indicated the protest movement was losing momentum when swearing shifted from curses at the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to curses at an opposition figure.
A March 2011 paper published in the Journal of Computational Science (abstract) also posited that movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average could be predicted to an accuracy of 86.7 percent by changes of national mood reflected in Tweets. According to The Economist, British hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets has licensed the algorithm to guide the investments of a $41 million fund.
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51 Comments so far
Show AllIs it an invasion of privacy when the information isn't private?
Where do we draw the line?
They don't want this in order to become more intrusive, they want it to make their existing intrusiveness more fun, convenient and cool.
Killing political dissent? There's an app for that!
We should keep in mind that beyond a perception (that of a defens[iv]e organization) of a given set of movements to be controlled by that organization, is the reality that is the highly differentiated life of an individual - alive in time and space. One of the implications is that it denies the voice, breadth and altruism inherent in life. It narrows life to a binary on/off set of interpretive criteria that are founded on oral/anal immediate gratification of "I say what you are and what you are doing - AND WHAT YOU WILL want TO DO.
This is a perverse version of what western "civilization" has denied in terms of humanity in its racism, going back to the definition of "property" set forth in the Papal Bulls of the Doctrine of Discovery of the 15th century. It claims that life is a battle and that there are winner and losers. The most recent spin being that the economic system is god. One is supposed to believe - apparently - that its failing are actually confirmation that it is right and that it has no beginning and no end. That system of thought has marginalized people for centuries in order to create profit "margins".
This attempts to reinforce the premise that one is guilty until proven innocent. Clay Shirky goes over this - http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_ba...
"And few see the parallels between what is happening here and the rise of Nazism in Germany in the thirties. The primary difference is in the level of technology available."
You can search and find current Annonymous actions against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, Facebook, and more. I read that Annonymous will soon attack Facebook by exposing vast numbers of nefarious users' data and deleting "innocents' " accounts. How they will divide those categories is not clear, but their purpose is to destroy Facebook for already serving users' data to spy agencies.
There are reports that Facebook has been requiring users' to use real identities and verify with documentation. It does not seem right that they decide users' online identity. Twitter also seems inherently week on privacy. One start-up company took a twitter-like communications tool to the Occupy Wall Street events, and the demonstrators were able to use it to coordinate their movements: Users could list an alias and log into zones of specified radii (immediate vicinity to world-wide) from their current location. It is Twitter live-and-local.
"Facebook has been requiring users' to use real identities and verify with documentation. It does not seem right that they decide users' online identity."
The new Google "privacy" policy does exactly that: Google determines what your on-line identity is, makes it uniform across all platforms, and bases it on verification of who you actually are.
It's really their "non-privacy" policy. It's just a long litany of Google's rights to do whatever it wants with your information, and no opt-out provisions.
Also, this is a "watch what you say" to the public threat to free speech and violation of the rights of citizens to be free from searches without a warrant by the government.
This is obvious and they will take all their time with false alarms but that would be another government jobs program and would include the private sector techie jobs which Obama could brag about. I guess Hoover’s tactics were not bad enough.
Rebel With A Cause.
i know we have a lot of major crises to think about: Climate and ecosystem disruption and the 6th extinction; war, fascism and the police state; unaccountable economic and financial oligarchy, plutocracy and kleptocracy; and these of course are all intertwined manifestations of one grand synergistic civilizational meta-crisis.
BUT, i sure wish more folks saw this informational, network, cybernetic crisis as being of equal weight as these other aspects of our synergistic meta-crisis.
We're not just talking about freedom, liberty, surveillance, police power, social and political movements etc, as important as all these are in their own right. In some way, the new projects are just updates on old blueprints for exercising state power.
BUT, there is qualitative difference, given the development of computing power, cybernetics, networking, the internet, GPS, etc.
Here's what i wrote in three posts on the Google thread yesterday:
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i do use Google search and i have a Google e-mail account. i can't say i was surprised to read the provisions of the new "policy" when i followed the link Google put in my face. But it is pretty much as bad as i feared, as bad as it can possibly be.
The whole "privacy policy" is a listing of rights that Google has to use your data without opt-out provisions. There is not any obvious way to even reply or communicate.
They are issuing you their ruling, finding in their favor that they can sell advertising packages built on crafting of intimately personal targeted strategies against your being, your consciousness, your experience, your self, your social network, society, humanity.
Access by the state to storehouses of personal information is dangerous. But the larger issue is the purpose, and power, of the tool: employing sophisticated understandings of human psychology, social psychology, economics, game theory, marketing, network analysis, enabled by super-computing, to assess the socio-economic behaviors of individuals, groups and masses, of trends and movements, all done by and for powerful interests who develop these tools on the crest of advancing technology, using the fantastic possibilities unleashed by the cybernetic networking of humans for purposes of centralization, greed, power, and profit.
All sold, and widely swallowed, as happiness, self-empowerment, service, freedom.
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Many people do sincerely like this utter lack of security and privacy. It brings your favorite corporate branding and marketing right into your awareness, carefully reflected in a mirror that looks just like you. It enables correct targeted marketing, correct product placement, and that's not only good for business, it's good for you! You get the ads you want! The things you dream of parade through your awareness, in sophisticated engaging formats! You feel good about yourself, and the images and brands you identify with!
This is perhaps the most powerful tool ever created.
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Seems like an inevitable step, this corporate edict defining the shape of your virtual identity, in the era of Anonymous, OWS, Wikileaks etc, and at the time of the NDAA, PIPA and SOPA, etc.
A real moment of diverging potential evolutionary pathways for the emerging networked existence that is developing from networked humanity.
Which side are you on? Most of us will continue with Google in our pocket, ourselves in Google's pocket, right through the mass implantation of direct connections into our brains. Who would possibly go through the hassle - not to mention the professional suicide - of opting out of the dominant technological formations of our moment in cultural evolution?
Who does not drive? Who does not carry a phone? Who will not accept the implant? Who will resist?
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The whole bogus thing is a paranoia to protect the real criminal while framing or setting up a 'criminal of choice' to be able to incarcerate people whom may offend those criminals on the loose. And nothing about trying to catch the criminals which is something that the fbi has not done for a pretty good while on a regular basis. They became the law enforcement for the 1%.
1) A new device must fit inside a one inch thick, soft layer that attaches to toilet seats. Yes, that's right, toilet seats. Before they hit the water, it will convert the DNA of body excretions to those of FBI agents at least one thousand miles distant at the time of the bowel & bladder evacuation.
2) A new device needed is a capsule the size and shape of a human turd. Held inside the device is a suitable amount of plastic explosive. Used inside the sewer systems of cities that have an office of the FBI, the homing device will course through the sewer system to the plumbing of that FBI office.
Decades ago, FBI agents in two states contacted and terrified my grandmothers in nursing homes, for no purpose of information gathering, only to demonstrate the harm they could do to my family for my refusal to kill Vietnamese people. They attended my father's funeral. Later, they initiated the stripping of my citizenship, only to lose face in federal court and have the judge read them a Riot Act.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been my FBI watchdog for 13 years. My series of websites have contained links to articles showing the egregious psychopathy of this agency - to which they demand all citizens take a loyalty oath or suffer the consequences. These domestic terrorists believe they are keeping ME safe from foreign terrorists. Sometimes the human brain holds less intelligence than a flower pot.
Trylon
I don’t use tweets or facebook but if somebody from Wall Street was monitoring the moods here the stock market would close for good.
NSA records ten times the amount of information of the Library of Congress everyday, but they haven’t won a war since 1945.
Too much information is not for real National Security, it is an unconstitutional corrupt government jobs program and shouldn’t scare anybody here and it sounds like nobody here is really scared but pissed as we should be. We are a special group as far as I can see so their attempts to shut us up with fear is not gonna work. They don’t know who they are messing with and that is their problem.
Just Keep Going.
Ebonics.
Crying at the passing of "Dear Leader". Ask the N Koreans how to cope.
Mimes may be the last ones standing...
Come Onnnn, Climate Change!!!