By DAVID SALEH RAUF
4/4/12 11:52 PM EDT
Politico:
Uncle Sam wants to read your tweets and Facebook updates — and, in some cases, already scours your feeds.
Federal agencies have realized they can mine social media for intel to help thwart potential terrorist strikes, keep tabs on domestic protests and better help citizens after a natural disaster. But privacy groups are clamoring for Congress to intervene, likening it to Big Brother.
“That’s a gray area we’re all trying to define,” Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, told POLITICO. “The concept that the government would somehow be monitoring and storing inquiries of individual Web activities — many would find that disconcerting.”
It’s a reality in the social-media generation, however. The federal government informally has been combing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks for publicly available citizen tidbits for years. Now, several agencies — the FBI and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency included — are seeking custom tracking technologies to help them scrape social-media sites by computer for certain keywords or trending topics that could help provide them with real-time intelligence.
Privacy advocates have taken to the courts to fight federal agencies to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests on these programs, which they are concerned have the potential to not only invade privacy but silence peaceful dissent.
“I think the government itself is a little schizophrenic on this,” said Jim Dempsey, vice president of public policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a cyberliberties group.
“On the one hand, there’s clearly the appropriate desire to say, ‘When a hurricane hits, we want to get information on the ground.’ Then there are others that say, ‘We also want to hear about protests and demonstrations,’” Dempsey added.
The Department of Homeland Security has drawn quite possibly the most public scrutiny for its online tracking efforts. The agency now mines Twitter and Facebook for a list of hundreds of keywords, ranging from “snow” to “cyberattack.” DHS contends the monitoring program is limited in scope and focuses only on events, not people.
Still, two privacy groups — the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have filed separate lawsuits against DHS over the release of documents about policies and contracts governing its social media monitoring program. EPIC is also calling for DHS to suspend its program in light of recent disclosures.
Lawmakers aren’t sitting on the sidelines either. DHS’s top privacy officials were grilled in front of Meehan’s subcommittee in February and could have to answer more questions in the future.
“We’re still concerned about who actually was directing the investigators to make specific inquiries,” Meehan said of the DHS social media monitoring program. “We do intend to follow up on this, on this issue.”
The FBI also recently sent shock waves through online privacy circles when it asked private tech vendors for information on a custom piece of tracking technology that can scrape social-media sites for billions of keyword hits daily. Aside from monitoring publicly available social feeds and news sites, the agency says the tool must also be able to view, plot and mesh FBI-gathered terrorist data with geospatial coordinates.
The FBI says its tracking efforts won’t focus on “persons or protected groups.”
Meanwhile, DARPA, the military’s tech and R&D arm, issued a pre-solicitation last summer for “innovative research proposals” to better leverage social media for military operations. According to DARPA documents, the agency was aiming to develop a system to “detect, classify, measure, track and influence events in social media at data scale and in a timely fashion.”
DARPA and the FBI say that personally identifiable information won’t be collected and stored, according to the agencies’ solicitation documents.
DARPA and the FBI say that personally identifiable information won’t be collected and stored, according to the agencies’ solicitation documents.
The DHS program, on the other hand, allows for the culling of such data in cases involving a narrow niche of folks, ranging from senior U.S. and foreign government officials to terrorists and drug cartel leaders, according to a DHS privacy compliance review from November. Personal information gathered on anyone else is supposed to be “redacted immediately before further use and sharing,” the privacy document says.
A senior DHS official also stressed to POLITICO that the agency’s social media monitoring program only mines data that users allow to permeate in public online forums.
“The information that is being analyzed … is publicly available. If you have changed your settings on Facebook to only have friends see it, the Department of Homeland Security would never see it,” the official said. “We are sticking to the privacy setting you, the user, have defined.”
Those are a few examples of federal agencies making public their plans to scour online chatter for information. Privacy hawks say more social-media-based tracking is likely to be employed by intelligence agencies well beyond the scope of any public arena.
“The fact that you haven’t seen an RFP from the CIA doesn’t mean they’re not doing it,” Dempsey said. “But my concern is not necessarily how extensive this is, it’s more of how are they using it.”
How the government uses the data it mines and who has oversight are among the toughest issues to tackle. Privacy groups and lawmakers agree that government can tap the power of social media for good.
DHS, for example, says its program that has taken heat from privacy groups also helped Haiti earthquake relief efforts and is primarily focused on “situational awareness purposes during times of crisis.”
President Barack Obama and a wide swath of lawmakers have taken to online town hall sessions as a way to connect with voters. And Twitter and Facebook also served as a digital ground zero for the eventual demise of SOPA and PIPA, giving activists a platform to create a groundswell of opposition lawmakers couldn’t ignore.
Former Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra refers to the collective social-media movement as a “technological shift” that is “going to change government forever.”
“It creates new pressure points in a positive way,” Kundra told POLITICO of the so-called social revolution sweeping government. “You’re going to see more and more of that when it comes to public service.”
But there’s plenty of wiggle room for the feds to cross the line, privacy advocates argue. To remedy that, they propose more transparency from the agencies doing the tracking and better congressional checks.
“People would like government to be more responsive to events. Nobody wants a situation like Katrina,” said Jennifer Lynch, an EFF staff attorney. “If the government would stick to that, it could be a laudable goal.”
But she added: “The government is still trying to navigate social media, and they’ve definitely overstepped their boundaries on certain issues.”
Privacy groups have already racked up a number of troubling examples. They stem from documents released over the past two years as a result of lawsuits.
EFF in 2009, for example, sued DHS, along with five other federal agencies, to compel them to release documents about policies for using social networks for investigations and surveillance.
Documents released to the EFF show the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services used Facebook to investigate citizen petitions. Other documents show that DHS tracked online communication leading up to Obama’s Inauguration in 2009.
EFF is still fighting DHS and the Justice Department in the case, according to court records.
DHS’s program is also facing a court challenge from EPIC, which filed suit in December 2011 for documents relating to contracts for the monitoring program.
The resulting DHS disclosures — which include details about the agency awarding a contract to General Dynamics to monitor media and social networks and specifically identify reports “that reflect adversely on the U.S. government and the Department of Homeland Security” — have only helped to fan the flames.
“We’ve been in contact with members of Congress,” said Ginger McCall, director of EPIC’s Open Government Program. “We’re certainly hoping they follow up.”
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