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<div class="node-header"> <span class="submitted"> Published on
Friday, November 16, 2012 by <a
href="http://www.commondreams.org">Common Dreams</a> </span>
<div class="node-title">
<h2 class="title">Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy
Office'</h2>
</div>
<div class="author"> - Common Dreams staff </div>
</div>
<div class="node-content clear-block prose">
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<p>A section of the US Department of Homeland Security known as
the "Privacy Office" recently approved a DHS initiative
designed to monitor social media sites for "emerging threats,"
<a
href="http://cironline.org/reports/homeland-security-office-oks-efforts-monitor-threats-social-media-3988"
target="_blank">according a new report</a> by the Center for
Investigative Reporting -- a move that will add to fears that
the US government may be 'friending' and 'following' an
increasing number of citizens for surveillance purposes.</p>
<p><span class="image-right" style="width: 275px;"> <img
src="cid:part3.06060102.06090907@gmail.com" alt=""
title="" class="imagecache imagecache-headline_image
imagecache-default imagecache-headline_image_default"
height="206" width="275"> <span class="caption"> U.S.
Department of Homeland Security analysts at National
Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center
(NCCIC (Reuters/Hyungwon Kang) </span></span>Congress
created the Privacy Office in 2003 to monitor DHS initiatives
and databases to ensure citizens' rights are protected.</p>
<p>However, social media monitoring, an increasingly common
practice used by Homeland Security and other US departments,
has now been given the official stamp of approval.</p>
<p>"As Americans turn to social media sites like Twitter and
Facebook to communicate with one another, intelligence
officials are looking for ways to harness that ocean of data
and convert it into actionable information," CIR reports.</p>
<p>For example, in 2010, The Electronic Frontier Foundation
discovered that federal Immigration Services investigators
were “<a
href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/10/applying-citizenship-u-s-citizenship-and"
target="_blank">friending</a>” people on Facebook who were
applying to become citizens in order to monitor their lives
and "snoop for marriage details." Such activities are now
acceptable forms of surveillance according to the Privacy
Office.</p>
<p>The Homeland Security Department is currently on Twitter
under the handle @DHSNOCMMC1 in a bid to conduct vast hashtag
and keyword searches in hopes mining potential "threats."</p>
<p>"Program employees... hunt for dozens of keywords in the
social media landscape using relatively simple and widely
available tools like TweetDeck. For that reason, it’s unclear
how words like 'burn,' 'cocaine' or 'collapse' can be analyzed
effectively enough to reveal truly useful information among
the hundreds of millions of tweets that course across the Web
every day," G.W. Schulz of CIR <a
href="http://cironline.org/reports/homeland-security-office-oks-efforts-monitor-threats-social-media-3988"
target="_blank">writes</a>.</p>
<p>The Department of Homeland Security is not alone in these
projects. According to CIR reporting, the FBI is now <a
href="https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=3e25a30a392debbef78a8330ee72ff72&_cview=0"
target="_blank">developing</a> a tool to "alert agents of
developing threats on social media, scrape historical data
from the Web that can be searched later and display messages
coming from a defined geographical area."</p>
<p>The Department of Defense is exploring how to “forecast
dynamic group behavior in social media" in a bid to
"simultaneously scan more than 1,000 groups, more than 100,000
postings per day and more than 1 million people."</p>
<p>An entire industry has developed to satisfy these
surveillance fantasies, soon to be reality, as a growing
number of private tech firms are now marketing tools that are
"capable of automatically analyzing vast segments of the
Internet and make simple keyword searches elementary by
comparison," and pitching them to US departments and law
enforcement agencies.</p>
<p>Given the recent approval by the Privacy Office, "there are
no assurances that down the road, homeland security officials
won’t seek much more sophisticated tools that can
automatically mine the [entire] Web for what they determine to
be a threat or use secret tactics that alarm privacy rights
advocates."</p>
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