Posts Tagged ‘political thought’
FBI wants an app to monitor what you say at Facebook and Twitter
The FBI plans to step up the monitoring of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and has asked for help building an app to constantly monitor the sites.
Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at “publicly available” information. Contractors have until 10 February to suggest solutions.
US enforcement agencies have increasingly been using social networks to track crime. Recently over 40 members of two feuding New York gangs were indicted in connection with a series of shootings and killings in Brooklyn after they boasted about their crimes on Twitter…
But the increasing monitoring of social networks has also alarmed privacy advocates. Last year, Twitter disclosed that the justice department had subpoenaed it to get personal records of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks aide.
Lillie Coney, associate director of EPIC, a Washington-based privacy group, called the FBI request “ridiculous.”
“Get a warrant,” she said. “You don’t know half the people you communicate with on Twitter. They are going to launch investigations and start looking at all sorts of people that they have no right to be investigating. There is no accountability, no transparency and no oversight.”
The RFI calls on companies to develop a “secure, light weight web application” for the FBI’s strategic information and operations center. “The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”
The product must allow the FBI to keep hold of cached information as well as real time data, and allow that information to be linked to specific locations and easily shared…
The FBI did not return calls for comment.
I haven’t any beef with the premise of government recording, analyzing public data. In and of itself, that can be productive and useful. The concern is as old as the FBI. That is, what will they do with the information?
Guidance, oversight, standards of decency reflecting our Constitutional freedoms have little to do with day to day practices in the FBI – or in practice all the way down to local law enforcement. I witnessed a friend’s guitar smashed by a copper because he showed up on the NCIC computer in the state trooper’s car as someone who opposed the VietNam War, worked for civil rights in Boston. Our justice system did nothing about that. Petty assaults on individual rights are a disgusting part of how law enforcement is practiced in the United States at ground level.
Why should I trust those who set the standards at the top – when they do little or nothing to enforce those standards down through the agencies they guide? We’re as likely to be harassed at work or home by info delivered to the FBI as being protected from gangbanger assaults.
Geeks continue to admonish newbies to realize that everything they say online is out there for the world to see. There is no privacy on public parts of the Web. I would add another reminder to my fellow Americans. Since the first time I stood up publicly and opposed racist law and practice — in a demonstration 50 miles from the White House in 1960 — I have had a file on my activities in the FBI. That’s a fact of life for anyone in this land who dissents. It’s a badge of honor.
