Jan 26

Revealed: The FBI Wants to Monitor Social Media

Information Technology Add comments
The FBI is looking to develop a web application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to gain better real-time intelligence about current or potential future security threats or situations.
This plan was inadvertently revealed by the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) in a market research request for a “Social Media Application.”
The eagle-eyed New Scientist picked up on the request, which aims to “determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application.”
Government agencies like the FBI are usually reluctant to openly discuss how social networks are used as an intelligence tool.
In the Request for Information document, the FBI lays out the requirements for the application that it is seeking to build. In the background portion of the document, the SIOC writes:
The FBI has conducted market research and determined that a geospatial alert and analysis mapping application is the best known solution for attaining and disseminating real time open source intelligence and improving the FBI’s overall situational awareness.
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