Now that Sopa and Pipa were hung up on the shelf, the FBI wants to start monitoring Social Media.  The FBI is looking to develop a web based application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.  Their reasoning is to gain better “real-time” intelligence about current or potential security threats.

The fact that all this information leaked out from the FBI is making me believe it’s not true.  At the same time, however, there is physical proof of documents that have been written up.  Government agencies like the FBI are typically reluctant to openly discussing tactics with intelligence tools.  So basically, this is a completely shocker.

Attached below is the full six page document.  Here are a few highlights that we want you to read first:

• 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 deÔ¨Åned 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 whole document is worth reading.  Within the document, you will notice a request for a “tweet lingo” dictionary within the application.

Personally, I can’t decide which side I want.  As much as I would hate feeling like I lost my freedom with Social Media, I think it would benefit us at the same time.  What if there is some type of organization that plans on attacking someone and is working through Twitter?  Then, the FBI would know about this and take action.  It’s a win, win or lose, lose.  It really depends on how you look at it.

We don’t know if they would be monitoring everyone’s accounts or just those accounts that seem to have potential threats.

What are your thoughts on this?  Do you think the government agencies should be using social media monitoring tools?  Let us know in the comments.

Social Media Application