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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/mexican-newspaper-uncovers-systemic-monitoringTwo weeks ago, the Mexican newspaper El Milenio reported on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPC) initiative to monitor social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world. The document, obtained by El Milenio through a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request, discloses how OPC’s National Operations Center (NOC) plans to initiate systematic monitoring of publicly available online data including “information posted by individual account users” on social media. The NOC monitors, collects and fuses information from a variety of sources to provide a “real-time snap shot of the nation’s threat environment at any moment.” The NOC also coordinates information sharing to “help deter, detect, and prevent terrorist acts and to manage domestic incidents.” The NOC has initiated systemic monitoring of publicly available, user-generated data to follow real-time developments in U.S. crisis activities such as natural disasters as well as to help corroborate data received through official sources with ‘on-the-ground’ input.
The monitoring program appears to have its basis in a similar program used by NOC in its Haitian disaster relief efforts, where information from social media sources provided a vital source of real-time input that assisted NOC’s response, recovery and rebuilding efforts surrounding the 2009 earthquake. The new initiative attempts to leverage similar information sources in assessing and responding to a broader range of crisis activities, including terrorism, cybersecurity, nuclear and other disasters, health epidemics, domestic security, and border threats. While the addition of real-time social media sources can be extremely beneficial in disaster relief-type efforts, the breadth of activities covered by the initiative as well as the keywords and websites scheduled for systemic monitoring raise potential concerns, and the safeguards put in place by the initiative may not be sufficient to address these.
The NOC report entitled, “Privacy Impact Assessment of Public Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative”, reveals that NOC’s team of data miners are gathering, storing, analyzing, and sharing “de-identified” online information. The sources of information are “members of the public...first responders, press, volunteers, and others” who provide online publicly available information. To collect the information, the NOC monitors search terms such as “United Nations”, “law enforcement”, “anthrax”, “Mexico”, “Calderon”, “Colombia”, “marijuana”, “drug war”, “illegal immigrants”, “Yemen”, “pirates”, “tsunami”, “earthquake”, “airport”, “body scanner”, “hacker”, “DDOS”, “cybersecurity”, and “social media”. The report also contains a list of sites targeted for monitoring, including numerous blogs and news sites, as well as Wikileaks, Technorati, Global Voices Online, Facebook and Twitter. As the report was released in January 2011, this monitoring may already be taking place.
More at the link --
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