Homeland Security Given Permission to Monitor (a.k.a. spy on) American Journalists

Freedom of the Press?  And how do you define "the Press"?  Are bloggers and social media mavens part of the Press?  And what if the government starts collecting information on those it deems are "the Press"?

Freedom of the Press is a nice principle that isn't really encoded in any laws.  It's not like Freedom of Speech that's so important it was the first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Freedom of the Press should mean that those of us who self-identify as Press can go about our business without government interference.  There are plenty of examples from around the world, both modern and in the past, of governments afraid of the stories reported by journalists, and they used all sorts of legal leverage against journalists, and in some cases unfairly imprisoning for supposed anti-government sentiments or whatnot, not to mention all the journalists killed under mysterious circumstances.  Freedom of the press is meant to counter that tendency of governments and other powerful people to try to stop certain stories from being published.

RT News is somewhat disingenuously reporting on an effort by the U.S. Homeland Security Department to gather publicly visible information about 'news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”'

This is a really broad definition of people because those who keep an audience "situationally aware and informed" includes anybody who routinely posts links to articles on social media networks.  Posting links to those networks is a highly common activity and is undertaken by anybody seriously interested in building an audience.

The project scours the social networks for information, but the DHS claims it is not collecting "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII) .. "While this Initiative is not designed to actively collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII), OPS is conducting this update to the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) because this initiative may now collect and disseminate PII for certain narrowly tailored categories."  While they aren't collecting PII they can collect it if necessary such as:  "For example, in the event of an in extremis situation involving potential life and death, OPS will share certain PII with the responding authority in order for them to take the necessary actions to save a life, such as name and location of a person calling for help buried under rubble, or hiding in a hotel room when the hotel is under attack by terrorists."

The authority cited is Section 515 of the Homeland Security Act (6 U.S.C. § 321d(b)(1)

Where the RT News report becomes disingenuous is when they say this:-  "The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses."

In other words, RT News is demonstrating a belief that this is somehow new behavior on the part of the U.S. Government.  In truth the Government has been working on what they call "open source intelligence" for years.  Namely, collecting publicly available information for intelligence gathering purposes.  The social media networks make this easy because many of us actively want to be found on those networks which is great if we want to build an audience, but that audience may include Big Brother government agents snooping on our every tweet.

I've written about this plenty of times before:- 

• Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic 
• Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information
• Massive privacy violation by U.S. government
• Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
• Federal Reserve looking to launch "sentiment analysis and social media monitoring" program

The thing about publicly available information is that it's publicly available.  Complaining about it being collected is a bit silly, really.

However it is troublesome.  For a reason why ponder a factoid about the Jewish Holocaust.  The Nazi government contracted with the IBM subsidiary in Germany to develop machines to assist with gathering and tracking information about the ethnicity of the population.  This was the 1930's and the technology were simple punch cards and automated machines for processing the punch cards, but there's no way in heck you could call these machines "Computers" because those didn't start to come into existence until the 1950's.  In any case no matter how rudimentary the machines IBM could supply at that time, it did enable the German government to efficiently find Jewish people to send to the Concentration camps.

Fast forward to the marvelous computers we have today ..




Some supporting documents:-

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/supporting-documentation-for-homeland.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/april-2010-bp-oil-spill-response-social.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/2010-winter-olympics-social-media-event.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/haiti-social-media-disaster-monitoring.html

Federal Reserve looking to launch "sentiment analysis and social media monitoring" program

A couple weeks ago the Federal Reserve Board of New York floated an RFP (Request for Proposals) for a program of "sentiment analysis" of social media networks.   I've embedded the scribd version of the doRFP below for your reading pleasure.

They seek to "to establish a fair andequitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and newssources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY."

The idea is for the Federal Reserve to have a system to monitor traffic on online social networks, gather the discussions, extract "sentiments" (thoughts, opinions) about the Federal Reserve, and report them to the FRB.

In part the issue here isn't so much that they're doing this - plenty of organizations are doing this already, and it's fair for organizations to want to know what is being said about them.  "Sentiment analysis" via monitoring social media is the act of summarizing what people are saying in online networks (twitter, facebook, etc) to extract information that's useful to the organization.   As they themselves say: "There is need for the Communications Group to be timely and proactively aware of the reactions and opinionsexpressed by the general public as it relates to the Federal Reserve and its actions on a variety of subjects."

In part the issue is that this is a pseudo-branch-of-government intent on tracking every conversation, and in particular "reach out to key bloggers and influencers" plausibly so they can control the messages from those key bloggers and influencers?

In part the issue is that the RFP timeline is it was issued on Sept 16, 2011, and that they expect a response (proposal) by Sept 28, 2011.  The two week timeline implies that there are software companies who have already developed this sort of service.  The FRB seems to expect the service can just be deployed (perhaps after the expenditure of many $$$'s of consultant time for training, installation, and support).

Their stated purpose is:

Social media listening platforms are solutions that gather data from various social media outlets and news sources.They monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria. They can also determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document.

The information gathered can guide the organizations public relations group in assessing the effectiveness of communication strategies.

Here are some of the services it can offer:

• Track reach and spread of your messages and press releases
• Handle crisis situations
• Continuously monitor conversations
• Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers
• Spot emerging trends, discussions themes and topics

 

Solution requirements:

A. Geographic scope of social media sites

The solution must support content coming from different countries and geographical regions. It should also support multiple languages.

B. Content and Data Types

The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.

C. Reports and Metrics

The solution must provide real-time monitoring of relevant conversations. It should provide sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) around key conversational topics.  It must be able to provide summaries or high level overviews of a specific set of topics. It should have a configurable dashboard that can easily be accessed by internal analysts or management. The dashboard must support customization by user or group access. The solution should provide an alerting mechanism that automatically sends out reports or notifications based a predefined trigger.

D. FRBNY Technology Integration

The solution must be able to integrate with existing FRBNY technologies such as: Google Search appliance, Lotus notes suite and web trends.  It must have support for single sign on or windows integrated authentication.

E. Cost Structure

The solution should offer a flexible pricing structure that can support multiple user licensing. It should also have the option to base pricing on content volume and usage. _Supplier acknowledges an understanding of and agrees to comply with the above minimum solutions requirements.

 

Frbny Social Media Rfp

Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic

Today NPR ran a piece on University of Buffalo Computer scientist Rohini Srihari who is developing automated translation software which can be aimed at social networks allowing english speaking folk to read non-english tweets. Maybe this sounds benign, after all Google Chrome has some of this ability built in. In another tab as I write I have a french web-page open which Chrome translated for me into semi-readable text. It's really useful having automated language translation because it can help us connect more readily with each other over the Internet. So why did I put an alarmist title on this post? It's because of the Dept of Defense Total Information Awareness system, and that Dr. Srihari's research is funded by the U.S. Military.

In case you've forgotten what TIA is, this occurred several dozen alarming revelations ago in the months after GW Bush was elected and remained public until some time in 2002. The TIA project was headed by (ret) Admiral Poindexter (the guy convicted of lying to congress during the Iran-Contra period) to apply modern datamining technology to national security intelligence activities. The intent is to create an all-encompassing system of tracking a huge amount of information (total information awareness), look for "patterns" indicating nefarious activities, and nip them in the bud early.

This was one of the first articles I posted way back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate ... The Defense Department pages referenced are no longer public, but I did a comprehensive summary of the program.

Dr. Rohini's project doesn't fit neatly into the projects cited under the TIA umbrella back in 2002, however many of the projects were associated with language translation. This way the US Intelligence Community could hire anybody, rather than rely on language/social experts, for intelligence analysts.

As the NPR piece said: "One way to follow what's going on in the Middle East and South Asia right now is through social media — Facebook, Twitter and blog posts." This is called "open source intelligence" or intelligence gathering from sources out in the open.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are awesome but one side effect is they force global social conversations to be conducted in the open where "anybody" can listen in. While that's kinda cool in the light of creating more connection between everyone on a global scale, it does mean that spies can snoop on everything.

What if, for example, the spies are looking for signs of an impending uprising against a brutal dictator who happens to be friendly to the United States, and receives lots of United States funding and equipment and training which increases the effectiveness of that dictators military forces? The U.S. routinely does this, support government leaders who are brutal to their people. Mubarak, the recently deposed leader of Egypt, was one of those brutal dictators.

What will the U.S. spies do if they notice the impending uprising? Stand back and applaud the revolution? Or do something that will help the brutal dictator stay in power? If the U.S. has invested so much money in maintaining a particular government structure (no matter how brutal) wouldn't they act to protect their investment?

As Dr. Rohini said: "What I want is to determine who are the people, places and things being talked about," she says. "Is there an opinion being expressed? Is it a positive or negative opinion being expressed?" And... "And when you are able to figure out what the topic of the conversation is," she says, "what kind of sentiment is being expressed around that, that's the goal of what we are trying to do." And... "So in Twitter posts and tweets and so on, if there's specific factual information that's being mentioned — they want that extracted," Srihari says. "There's also definitely an interest in sentiment and opinion mining."

Who's to say that foreigners speaking their local languages aren't the only group being targeted by the total information vacuuming project? Perhaps they're also vacuuming up social network conversations by Americans? Don't believe me? See: Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information

Other related articles:

Total Information Awareness lives on...

Another brick to building the Total Information Awareness system

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

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Links: 

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135049784/computer-translator-reads-between-the-tw...