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.

We’ve embedded the six-page document below, but here are some of the highlights:

Provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social
networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis,
and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI
SIOC.

Ability for user to create, define, and select parameters/key word
requirements. Automated search of national news, local news, and social
media networks. Examples include but are not limited to Fox News. CNN,
MSNBC, twitter, facebook, etc.

Provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and
emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the defined search
parameters.
Ability to immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to
providing critical infrastructural layers. Preferred maps include but
are not limited to Google Maps, Google 3D maps, ESRI, and Yahoo Maps.
Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all “publicly available” tweets across the twitter Site and any other “publicly available” social networking
sites/forums (i.e. facebook, MySpace, etc.).

The entire document is worth reading, if only to see the request for a “tweet lingo” dictionary within the app.

Monitoring social media activity isn’t limited to the FBI. Earlier this
month, House subcommittee members urged the Department of Homeland
Security to more closely monitor social media traffic.

While privacy advocates have bristled at the idea of social media
monitoring, the government position is that if information is public,
it’s fair game for scraping and monitoring.

The FBI’s RFI specifically targets “publicly available information” — rather than anything users keep private.


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