Home Security Improves with FBI’s Plan to Monitor Social Media
January 27, 2012
Online security has always been a topic of concern. In an age when our information can be shared with the click of a button, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare raise concerns. While your public information can be searched and used by burglars to breach your in home security, the FBI is currently researching an application that would benefit your safety. This recent article from BBC News reveals more about the application.
The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks. It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.
While social media monitoring is nothing new for law enforcement, this application would be a power source of information for the government. It will allow the FBI to quickly learn and pinpoint new developments as events are unfolding. For example, there were over 5,500 tweets per second last August when an earthquake struck the East coast.
Why Social Media?
“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.” It says the application should collect “open source” information and have the ability to:
- Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
- Allow users to create new keyword searches.
- Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using color coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the “preferred” mapping options.
- Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.
- Immediately translate foreign language tweets into English.
What About Privacy?
While the privacy of social media users has been debated, the FBI has defended its decision noting the application will only aggregate public information.
It justified the principle of using information that users have provided and not opted to make private.”Information posted to social media websites is publicly accessible and voluntarily generated. Thus the opportunity not to provide information exists prior to the informational post by the user,” it says.
It noted that the department’s National Operations Center had a policy in place to edit out any gathered information which fell outside of the categories relevant to its investigations. It also highlighted words it looked out for. These include “gangs”, “small pox”, “leak”, “recall” and “2600″ – an apparent reference to the hacking-focused magazine.
What Does This Mean For You?
This application will use current technology to help identify and stop emerging threats. This means monitoring social media posts and even predicting events before they happen. With riots, flash mobs and uprisings organized over social media networks; this could mean a new way to monitor your home security, this improved safety for your whole family.
