Source: Corbett Report
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
Responses to the request are due next month.
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation posted a Request for Information
last month calling on IT companies to demonstrate their ability to
design software for monitoring, mapping and analyzing social media.
The RFI, posted to the government’s Federal Business Opportunities
website in January, reveals the FBI’s desire for software capable of
monitoring social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to provide
alerts and analysis for publicly posted information. The software would
require the ability to:
“Geo-spatially locate bad actors or groups and analyze their
movements, vulnerabilities, limitations and possible adverse actions”
“Detect instances of deception in intent or action by bad actors”
and “Develop pattern-of-life matrices to support law enforcement planning and enforcement operations.”
The FBI is far from the only US government agency to express an interest in monitoring online social media.
In October 2010 the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents
on social network surveillance under the Freedom of Information Act
showing that the Department of Homeland Security has established a
“Social Networking Monitoring Center” for the collection and analysis of
online public communications.
Last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center obtained more FOIA documents
regarding the DHS social media surveillance, showing that the
department has contracted General Dynamics to monitor social networks
and even the comment sections of various news websites for “media
reports that reflect adversely on the US Government [or] DHS.”
Also last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a Request for Proposal
for “Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Monitoring” software. The
request called on companies to develop software to monitor social media
such as tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube comments to analyze what
people are thinking and saying about the United States’ privately-owned
central bank.
As Julie Lévesque notes in a recent GlobalResearch article,
however, even more ominous than these passive social media monitoring
programs are the various government programs for creating and spreading
propaganda through this new medium.
In February of last year it was revealed
that the US Air Force had solicited “persona management software” from
contractors through an FBO request. The contract called for vendors to
develop software which could allow up to 50 users to manage 500 online
personas, which would be created “with background , history, supporting
details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and
geographacilly consistent.” The request also called for virtual private
servers in specific geographic locations that could allow the social
media persona to appear to be from a different part of the globe. When
news of the proposal broke and several large websites began to draw
attention to it, it was quickly taken offline.
Last July, DARPA, the Pentagon’s research project wing, announced a “Social Media in Strategic Communication”
program. The announcement included language specifically calling for
the ability to “influence operations” in “the environment in which [the
Pentagon] operates,” meaning that it will be used to launch
“countermessaging” campaigns online, supposedly to combat the spread of
information harmful to the Pentagon’s interests.
Last month’s FBI request for information, too, crosses the line from
passive monitoring into active operations. One of the desired attributes
of the software that the FBI wants to develop is the ability to
“predict likely developments in the situation or future actions taken by
bad actors” by analyzing patterns and associations in the target’s
online communications. Once envisioned as a science-fiction scenario, America’s top law enforcement agency is now attempting to integrate pre-crime detection into their social media analysis.
Responses to the request are due next month.
