SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser
The FBI plans more social media surveillance
The FBI wants to gather more information from social media. Today, it issued a call for contracts for a new social media monitoring tool. According to a request-for-proposals (RFP), it's looking for an "early alerting tool" that would help it monitor terrorist groups, domestic threats, criminal activity and the like.
The tool would provide the FBI with access to the full social media profiles of persons-of-interest. That could include information like user IDs, emails, IP addresses and telephone numbers. The tool would also allow the FBI to track people based on location, enable persistent keyword monitoring and provide access to personal social media history. According to the RFP, "The mission-critical exploitation of social media will enable the Bureau to detect, disrupt, and investigate an ever growing diverse range of threats to U.S. National interests."
But a tool of this nature is likely to raise a few red flags, despite the FBI's call for "ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met." The government doesn't have the best track record with regard to social media surveillance. Early this year, the ACLU sued the government over its use of social media surveillance of immigrants, and the Trump administration has proposed allowing officials to snoop on the social media accounts of Social Security disability recipients.
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Monday July 15 2019, @04:40PM (2 children)
I'm not a fan of police-state style surveillance.
But, there do seem to be a big group of people who ignore that public social media pages are public, viewable by everyone on the planet. Guess what? "Everyone on the planet" INCLUDES your local, state, and federal police agencies. Without even having to get out of their chair. Honestly when people are putting VIDEOS of themselves online for the world to see doing illegal shit, I don't know if it even counts as surveillance when they get caught because someone comes across it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @05:44PM
i agree. i don't like the FBI for shit, but if they focus on the right stuff and use the info properly (not likely) they are just doing their jobs. in fact, it's pretty fucking lazy and dumb that they are just now starting to actually "care" about people publicly threatening to shoot/blow shit up.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 16 2019, @10:34PM
The problem is not with them using surveillance as a tool to find people about to commit terrorism or other criminal acts, it is the fact that despite all the surveillance to date we always seem to find they miss the sort of headline making perpetrators that commit the horrific, headline making acts of terror. The alarming social media activity of such perpetrators always seems to come to light after the fact, not before. So who and what are they actually watching, what sort of data are they collecting, and why are they collecting it?