FBI Looking for a Good Facebook-Snooping App
What online privacy?
People who imagine that hiding behind an anonymous nic, using a proxy server, using a throw-away email address, spoofing your IP address, etc. makes you 100% untraceable are living in a fantasy land. It may hide you from regular people, and maybe even from more adept internet users, but if serious, paid professionals come after you at the behest of the feds, they will find you sooner or later. There is always a trace left behind somewhere.
Think the government doesn’t monitor these political blogs? Think again. Not only does our government watch them, so do others. They have databases full of info. The knuckle-dragging haters out there, both left- and right-leaning, really should reassess the wisdom of leaving threats, violent fantasies and/or calls of incitement to violence on blogs and news sites. Most probably won’t though, since a feeling of invincibility usually seems to be part of their pathology.
Added emphasis below is mine.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a better way to spy on Facebook and Twitter users. That’s pretty much the gist of a new fedbizopps.gov post from the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) soliciting proposals for an app capable of sniffing through online media sites and social networks.
The successful app will “have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open-source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats,” according to a detailed guide to just what is the FBI is looking for in its online snooping tool.
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The ad even lists some prominent sites the government wants to get better acquainted with—Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, and Facebook, to be specific. Drilling down into the “operational capabilities” of the proposed app, the guidelines call for it to “instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all ‘publicly available’ tweets across the Twitter [s[ite and other ‘publicly available’ social networking sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).”