Homeland Security Digs Social Media
Big Brother metaphors are well-worn territory in an age of advanced technology, ubiquitous camera surveillance, and expanded federal power, but there is even more evidence that Homeland Security monitors more web activity than previously thought. According to a “privacy compliance review,” HSD keeps track of online activity on forums, blogs, websites and message boards. For example, an innocuous comment related to a biological strain being researched by Huntingdon Life Sciences animal testing might land you under the watchful gaze of the federal government, simply because of the word ‘strain’ apparently.
While this isn’t particularly surprising news, what is a bit unusual is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are listed right up next to controversial file-leaking sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome.
Other recent public disclosures have shown that the recent rise of political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa has prompted an increase in social media intelligence gathering. While guidelines limit how long domestic information gathered from social media can be stored, DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner acknowledged recently that contractors are tasked with investigating social media trends that could confirm certain pieces of intelligence related to national security. Other sites that are monitored include Hulu, Huffingtonpost, The Drudge Report, The ABC News blog “The Blotter,” and several Wired blogs. It is unclear who else besides the HSD will have access to this information and what other uses it’s being gathered for.
The monitoring is conducted by a special federally funded “Social Networking/Media capability” task force, which develops its own platforms for the searches and audits routers for outgoing IPs and URLs. The privacy compliance review asserts that this effort will provide “situational awareness” and will establish “a common operating picture.” The Homeland Security Department is billing the task force as a way to keep the federal government in the loop on trending public conversations that relate to national security. Whether this effort skirts certain constitutional provisions may come down to a protracted legal debate.
Privacy groups and consumer watchdogs like The Electronic Privacy Information Centre, however, claim that the HSD uses fake Twitter and Facebook profiles and flagged keywords like ‘virus’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ in order to identify users with private account info. Using one of the flagged keywords could cause all of your subsequent posts and web activities to be monitored. Privacy groups are attempting to use the Freedom of Information Act in order to assess how all this information is used—essentially monitoring the monitors—but have been unsuccessful so far.
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