Friday, January 27, 2012
FBI seeking social media monitoring toolBreitbartThe US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a tool to mine social media for intelligence tips. The US domestic law enforcement agency is asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would "enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing 'open source' actionable intelligence."
The January 19 open request was published on a website offering federal business opportunities and was first reported by New Scientist magazine.
The FBI said it is seeking an "open source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution" for its Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC).
"Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations," the FBI request said...[Full Article]
Labels: FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, monitoring
Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visitedC/Net Hawaii's legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.
Its House of Representatives has scheduled a hearing this morning on a new bill (PDF) requiring the creation of virtual dossiers on state residents. The measure, H.B. 2288, says "Internet destination history information" and "subscriber's information" such as name and address must be saved for two years.
H.B. 2288, which was introduced Friday, says the dossiers must include a list of Internet Protocol addresses and domain names visited. Democratic Rep. John Mizuno of Oahu is the lead sponsor; Mizuno also introduced H.B. 2287, a computer crime bill, at the same time last week...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, Hawaii, Internet, monitoring, privacy, tracking, web sites
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The US Air Force wants to monitor, track and analyze everything done on the Internet around the globe
Madison Ruppert,
Contributing WriterActivist PostDr. Mark Maybury, the
United States Air Force Chief Scientist, is stepping outside of the typical areas in which an Air Force Chief Scientist operates and into the digital realm.
Maybury seeks to develop something he has dubbed “Social Radar” which would monitor information coming from just about every
source imaginable: television, all Internet communications, radio, official reports, and more, in order to look into the hearts and minds of target populations and perhaps even predict future events.
The Department of Defense (DOD) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been working on
technology along these lines for some
time now, but Maybury’s vision seems even more expansive and hard to believe than anything I’ve previously heard of or read about.
Labels: big brother, monitoring, US Air Force
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Schools ‘spy’ on fat kidsMonitors raise privacy fearNew York PostBig Brother is joining the battle of the bulge.
A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock.
The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. The wristwatchlike devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students’ sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.
The information is displayed on a color-coded screen and gets transmitted to a password-protected Web site that students and educators can access.
Angel Chevrestt
TOO FAR, TOO FAST? School aide records a student’s heart rate.
The devices are already in use in school districts in St. Louis and South Orange, NJ — and have raised privacy concerns among some parents and observers.
But Ted Nagengast, the Bay Shore athletics chair, said, “It’s a great reinforcement in fighting the obesity epidemic. It tells kids, in real time, ‘Am I active? Am I not active?’ We want to give kids the opportunity to become active.”
The monitors are distributed by Polar Electro, of Lake Success, LI, the US division of a Finland firm...[Full Article]
Labels: childhood obesity, Long Island, monitoring, spying
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Homeland Security Is Reading and Recording Every KeystrokeThe New AmericanWith so many of our most essential liberties under attack from the oligarchy on the Potomac, it is little wonder that the freedom of the press and speech are next on the government guillotine.
Specifically, the Initiative sets out the plan and purpose behind the DHS’s collection of personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters, or anyone else who posts articles, comments, or other information to many popular web outlets. The report defines the target audience as anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”
Journalists and bloggers need not worry, however. DHS promises that it will not routinely gather and use Personally Identifiable Information (PII). From the abstract of the Initiative:
While this Initiative is not designed to actively collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII), OPS is conducting this update to the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) because this initiative may now collect and disseminate PII for certain narrowly tailored categories. For example, in the event of an in extremis situation involving potential life and death, OPS will share certain PII with the responding authority in order for them to take the necessary actions to save a life, such as name and location of a person calling for help buried under rubble, or hiding in a hotel room when the hotel is under attack by terrorists.
In other words, the government promises that all the personal electronic data that it monitors and records will only be used in “narrowly tailored” circumstances, saving a life, for example. There is no requirement that the data be used only in those instances, but there is a promise that it will be.
This unconstitutional, unwarranted search of private information is designed by DHS “to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture” of target audiences...[
Full Article]
Labels: Department of Homeland Security, DHS, monitoring
Homeland Security watches Twitter, social media(Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
A "privacy compliance review" issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" which involves regular monitoring of "publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards."
The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture."...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, monitoring, privacy
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times
The Atlantic Wire It's unclear exactly why, but the Department of Homeland has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months. Based on a privacy compliance review from last November recently obtained by Reuters, the purpose of the project is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture." Whatever that means. Either way, the list of sites reported by Reuters reveals in a Wednesday afternoon exclusive is pretty intriguing...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, monitoring, privacy
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
USA: Homeland Security monitors journalists Baltic ReviewFreedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what
US Dept. of Homeland Security
Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.
Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.” Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency...[Full Article]
Labels: Department of Homeland Security, DHS, journalists, monitoring
Friday, November 4, 2011
AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, FacebookMcLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.
At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt...[Full Article]
Labels: big brother, CIA, Facebook, monitoring, Twitter
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Big Sis To Monitor Twitter For Signs Of Social UnrestFederal agency concerned about riots breaking out in United States
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The wave of civil unrest that has swept the globe over the past year has prompted the Department of Homeland Security to step up its monitoring of Twitter and other social networks in a bid to pre-empt any sign of social dislocation within the United States.
“Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity,” reports the Associated Press.
Wagner announced that the federal agency would implement new guidelines that would focus on “gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes.”
Under the new framework, when the department receives information about a “potential threat,” it will then ask its contractors to look for relevant search references using “open source” information.
Although it’s somewhat naive to think that Homeland Security wasn’t already scanning the likes of Facebook and Twitter for social trends and signs of civil unrest, the fact that its now being announced publicly illustrates the increasing concern that riots which have hit the Middle East and Europe over the last 18 months will soon manifest themselves inside the United States.
Indeed, US law enforcement bodies are already scanning Twitter and Facebook for signs of unrest. Having launched a specialized unit to focus on gleaning clues from social media websites, the NYPD Disorder Control Unit recently brought together police from all five of the city’s boroughs to rehearse what the response would be “should out-of-control riots break out here”.
Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter came in for harsh condemnation following the UK riots, with Prime Minister David Cameron advocating authorities have the power to shut down access during times of public disorder, mimicking the Communist Chinese system of Internet censorship, which is used to curtail political protests.
Although the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the only real expression of civil unrest in the United States thus far, a worsening economic climate almost guarantees the prospect of an increase in social disorder across the globe.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO), a prominent UN agency, warned yesterday that the world faces an imminent “dramatic downturn” in employment, and a new recession which in turn would lead to greater social unrest, particularly in European countries.
In preparation for potential riots inside the United States, the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute issued a report in November 2008 entitled Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development.
The report lays out the strategy for how authorities would respond to “purposeful domestic resistance,” wherein U.S. troops would be deployed domestically to counter civil unrest. The report was issued weeks after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, and included a potential “economic collapse” as one of the scenarios under which troops would be used inside the U.S. to restore order.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
Labels: Department of Homeland Security, DHS, monitoring, social media, surveillance, Twitter
Friday, July 8, 2011
The CIA Put A Ton Of Cash Into A Software Firm That Monitors Your Online ActivityBusiness Insiderby Robert Johnson
July 7, 2011
Image: Jonathon Narvey via flickr
American intelligence communities are interested in your
YouTube video, flickr uploads, tweets -- even your online book purchases -- and for over a year they've been laying down some serious cash to get a better look at all of them.
According to Wired, the tech-focused investment firm In-Q-Tel, that works with the CIA, is investing in Visible Technologies who perform social media monitoring and analytics.
This is the first major shift in the spy community's commitment to monitoring public conversations that fill the Internet in blog posts, web uploads, purchases, TV shows, podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles every day.
Visible pulls from over 500,000 every 24 hours, grabbing more than one million posts, conversations, images, videos, and Amazon purchases. Clients get tailored real-time results of what's happening based upon desired keywords.
Once Visible has a handle on what's being said it "scores" each post and labels it negative or positive, mixed or benign. It also factors the influence of the author, or conversation, weighing each comment separately. The end-user interface then allows clients to tag user comments, and dialogue on them with colleagues.
While the program could benefit global security, the possibility for abuse is epic.
“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations.
Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”
When the CIA became an end user like Dell, AT&T and Microsoft who all use it to track customers -- what they do with the data they've purchased is entirely up to them.
The size of the CIA's investment in Visible is unknown, but the infusion of cash is supposed to be sufficient to enhance the company's foreign language capabilities.
A screen grab from the interface Image: Wired |
This is the first in a two part series tht examines the CIA's investment in online trending.
Labels: Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, monitoring, privacy, surveillance
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