[governance] Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy Office'

[Riaz K Tayob]

Published on Friday, November 16, 2012 by Common Dreams 
<http://www.commondreams.org>


    Social Media Surveillance OK'd by DHS 'Privacy Office'

- Common Dreams staff

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," according a new report 
<http://cironline.org/reports/homeland-security-office-oks-efforts-monitor-threats-social-media-3988> 
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.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security analysts at National Cybersecurity 
& Communications Integration Center (NCCIC (Reuters/Hyungwon Kang) 
Congress created the Privacy Office in 2003 to monitor DHS initiatives 
and databases to ensure citizens' rights are protected.

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.

"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.

For example, in 2010, The Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that 
federal Immigration Services investigators were "friending 
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/10/applying-citizenship-u-s-citizenship-and>" 
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.

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."

"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 writes 
<http://cironline.org/reports/homeland-security-office-oks-efforts-monitor-threats-social-media-3988>.

The Department of Homeland Security is not alone in these projects. 
According to CIR reporting, the FBI is now developing 
<https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=3e25a30a392debbef78a8330ee72ff72&_cview=0> 
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."

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."

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.

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."

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20121118/67ee362a/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 222222arlington-homeland-washington.n.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 32686 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20121118/67ee362a/attachment.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t